The first thing I would suggest is to reseat the data cable on the hard drive and the motherboard. The error message about the second hard drive can be stopped by going into bios (F2 at startup) and setting it to off or none.

I was on  the phone with a dell tech support (I sincerely thanked them for trying, but I could only understand every other word they said.).

They have it narrowed down to bad hard drive.  How do I know that it's not the IDE controller?