I installed a used asus a8b-e se board. I set it to default settings. It works well with my ide drives, but does not see the sata drives. I tested only one sata drive at a time, making sure the cables and connections were good. Since it is used and I have no idea how the board was originally configured, would flashing the bios fix the problem?

Certainly if the installed BIOS is older than the latest available a newer one might help.

SATA-150 boards could be picky about supporting SATA-300 or SATA-600 drives. You might need to use vendor software or a drive jumper to limit a newer SATA drive to 150 for the BIOS to work with it.

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Flashing the bios did not fix seeing the sata drive. I added a pci to sata adapter card which shows up during the post test and lists the attached sata drive. Also, in the motherboard bios page under devices, the sata drive is also now listed. During the boot, grub boot loader starts and I see the opensuse splash screen listing my boot options. All seems fine until this is listed while the os is booting:
A start job is running for tell Plymouth to write out runtime data. Block bitmap and bg descriptor inconsistent: 11451 vs 11449 free clusters

The above line seems to run forever. I thought maybe the os was corrupt, so I tried to reinstall the os and made the drive worse. During the install attempt, there were many write errors. I then pulled another sata drive with the same os from a similar box and found a similar start job error as listed above. IDE drives work fine. The sata pci card came with a mini driver disk. I listed the contents and it appears to be for various windows versions.

A clue on the boot screen said that the acpi driver should be updated and not to use the stock driver.

The new motherboard is a used one identical to the one that failed. The sata drive was working fine prior to the motherboard failure. When I was having the kernel panics, I kept trying to boot with the sata drive and I'm not sure if that affected the drive because I did not do a clean shut down.

Is there a hard drive diagnostic that can give me the info on its status?

Smartctl returns much diagnostic data about a HD, if it's used to test first, Otherwise, much of the data it returns will be stale. Smartctl should be available on any live Linux boot.

Plymouth is essentially bling, a GUI prettification during boot to replace scrolling diagnostic messages (like Windows does). Plymouth can be disabled or removed.

the fact that the board has ide suggests it is old.

so a couple of things
you may need to reconfigure the bios to change the sata mode to AHCI or something similar

as already mentioned you might also need to set jumper on the drive for compatibility
( I do recall a horrid experience where I need to use software to flag a drive, but needed a compatible pc to do it !! )

another possibility is the sata shares with ide, so you have to disable the ide chipset to get the sata port working ( and disable sata for the ide ) this is usually only one or two or the ports, often they are physically located near the ide.

Edit: or simply not plug ide in
ahh, the good old days

If it were me, I'd go the website of the manufacturer of the motherboard and get the manual for it.

Doing that may tell you more than our speculations.

Did you try setting the BIOS to the factory defaults?

This is one of those "transitional" motherboards that came out when SATA started becoming a thing. I'm guessing that you have a need for the floppy drive and/or the IDE connectors and cannot make the quantum leap to something current.

I have a motherboard (Core2 Duo-based) from that period that served as the home mail/web/file server and never liked any of the newer SATA drives I tried plugging into it when we needed more space. Jumpering the new drives did not work. I had to replace the motherboard with something new. Probably not something you're wanting to hear. The Core2 board became an upgrade for our firewall though I wound up having to grab an old two-channel SCSI adapter and a pair of 36GB/15K drives and setting up a RAID1 on it to get it up and running, though. (Luckily, I hadn't completely rid myself of the old SCSI hardware I had at the time.)

One thing that might be biting you is that older motherboards fail due to filter capacitors going bad. Take a close look at them. If the tops of them are bulging (see photo), they've gone bad. When they do, the system will behave very strangely. It may take several attempts to boot. It may boot and run fine for a while and then mysteriously crash. The crashes can start out being infrequent but increase in frequency over time. It may not boot at all. It's basically a goner if you spot bad caps.

There are some places that seem to specialize in older hardware. Check these folks out. They have some older hardware, replacement parts, etc. for a variety of old but still useful equipment (they probably have used warp coils and flux capacitors squirreled away in their stock). You may find some older drives that work. Places like NewEgg may have some older stuff, too.

Good luck...

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I should have noticed that you have two bad A8B-E SEs. This increases suspicion of bad caps as your problem. Bad caps also show up in power supplies, remaining a widespread problem well after motherboard manufacturers mostly switched their most important/larger caps to polys. If bad caps on motherboard are the issue, repair is possible. See https://badcaps.net/ for both repair service and instruction on self cap replacement. I've successfully replaced both motherboard and PS caps on several occasions, likely more than a dozen combined, but failed nearly as often. Bad caps can damage other components whose damage can only be found via skill with test instruments.

Is A8B-E SE a typo? Several posts on badcaps.net discuss trouble from A8V SE boards. "B" in Asus boards model names has historically meant "baby" form factor.