New System detects SSDs, but not mechanical HDDs! And it bricks the HDDs!

I got my new build (AORUS Z690 Elite AX, updated BIOS) up and running with Windows 11 and everything seems good except for one really strange thing that I've never seen before in over 10 builds.

The system works great with SSDs, both the SATA kind and the NVMe kind. I have two of each running fine. But for some reason the system won't recognize any of my old spinning platter hard drives that I want to move over from my old system.

I've tried three of my old HDDs and they apparently don't even spin up, as far as I can tell. The BIOS doesn't see them at all.

I looked at the SATA ports in the BIOS and enabled every function that could be enabled (eg: hot swap) One thing I see that looks odd is that each of the six ports says SATA 1 [not installed] SATA 2 [not installed] etc... There is nothing clickable in the BIOS screen to change this setting. Not sure if it is important or not. It doesn't change when I hook up a SATA SSD.

The really ominous thing is that when I put my old HDDs back in my old system, they won't spin up there either! It looks like I may have bricked three HDDs! Luckily the data is backed up elsewhere and two of those drives are small and won't be missed.

I'm wondering if this is some sort of driver problem or some sort of BIOS configuration problem. Anyone run into this problem before? Any idea how to reactivate those three HDDs? There was never any smoke or other sign of physical damage.

Thanks in advance!

Mike