Yes. I've worked on a few Alienware laptops and there is that option in BIOS (NO RAID + ATA should make the drives appear 99% of the time, of course the preferred settings are RAID + AHCI but ya gotta do what ya gotta do). Having said that I still hate the damn things, way too complicated lol.
He can also use G-Disk/DBAN/etc. to completely wipe both drives so that there is no question about whether the filesystem or whatever is affecting their viability (which is highly unlikely).