Cannot install a Dell Poweredge T310 (missing DVD bay and SATA drives in boot options)

Hello,

I have a PowerEdge T310, with a PERC H200 SAS controller and two SAS 4 TB drives (Western Digital WD4001FYYG).

I would like doing this:

1. Check the S.M.A.R.T. values of each SAS HDD, and especially that the drives have no spin hours.
2. Install an operating system, most probably a Linux distro like CentOS.

For step 1, I planned doing a temporary install of Windows 7 to a SATA disk, so that I could use HD Sentinel Professional portable version (which is on an USB flash drive) to test the drives.
Maybe would be an easier solution. The important thing is that I don't want to install any OS to the SAS drives to test them.

I could enter the BIOS setup, and switch some SATA ports from "off" to "auto".
Although I left the BIOS using Esc, and accepted to store changes, this choice is not remembered after the server was powered off and restarted. In the available boot devices, I cannot see the DVD bay, nor the SATA drive. Seemingly, I'm doing something wrong ...

I'm accustomed to the BIOS of Dell Optiplex desktops and Dell Latitude notebooks.
However I'm new to the BIOS of Dell PowerEdge servers.

For step 2, I assume I'll have to hit Ctrl+R at start and set virtual disks.
I plan to use the drives in RAID 1 (i.e. mirrored), with a small system partition and a large data partition.
I would prefer installing offline from DVDs (without Internet connection) if there is no major drawback to this approach.

Can someone give me a little help?
Thank

(I hope posting in the right section; what does HW mean?)