the other ports for SATA are probably turned off in the BIOS' Storage settings.
#Specific HDD Drives Not Showing Up
woeful galleon
what's HGST, a brand? are they 3.5 inch HDD?
That needs enough power to run many hdd
can u boot Mint, n run the Disks app and look it good
perhaps they r there, just not formatted right
as in, not at all even formatted
Disks app shows nothing in the left?
do u see a dots menu in the titlebar?
idk weird stuff
do you have a sata usb enclosure with power supply?
to test them
on that same pc
another way to check if it's your ports, is connect only one HGST drive to the known-working sata port that ur usual linux boot drive occupies
and then boot the pc using the Mint Live USB or DVD
Yikes. that issue is puzzling
u say they are tested and known to run on a Debian box
it must be something in the UEFI/BIOS of this particular pc
and i doubt but might the sata hdd's have a jumper on the back of them?
can u feel them spin up from a cold start?
try with other power connectors that r known-working
gotcha.
well I'm completely out of ideas
do they at least spin-up using a usb-to-sata enclosure/bridge cable?
(and external power supply of course)
as they should.
in BIOS, check storage mode is AHCI.
and that sata ports 1 thru 4 (or higher, if applicable) are set to ON, or Auto, or similar.
could the bios be on RAID? Ensure AHCI for sata config
yep. well idk. check the gold contacts on the drives. maybe something flaked since u last had them running on the Debian box
systemic failure on both drives due to faulty connector
idk . put em on the debian box. run smart info from the dots menu of the DISKS app
just clues for health, age, perhaps something alarming
or more importantly, that it can even fetch the SMART data to begin with