Dell 1525 - 1.5tb - physical no logical recognition win7 home

I have a Dell 1525 with the factory hard drive and several usb external hard drives for backup.

Two of the drives are 1tb with different brand names and work correctly and efficiently.

Recently, I have purchase a 1.5tb hard drive and it fails to be recognized as a logical drive.

I have used two different brands of 1.5 tb drives with the same problem.  Each of these drives

worked correctly on another computer. I use only one usb drive at a time.

Working through Disk Management the drive appears but cannot be assigned a logical drive letter

and returns an error stating that Disk Management must be refreshed or the computer rebooted.

Diskpart also fails and reassigns spurious drive letters to the other drives connect to the system.

After booting Spinrite the program views the usb hd but points to an error with the bios.

 I have the most current bios, A17 installed and recently reinstalled.

A Dell forum, Microsoft and Google search has not turned up any resolution to this problem.

Does anyone have a resolution for this hardware problem?

Thanks