Problem solved. I guess the CMOS battery is necessary to recognize two hard drives even if BIOS Setup already had the drives' characteristics. If I asked the BIOS to determine the HDDs again, it drew blanks, but I always exited Setup without saving so that the previously automatically-detected characteristics would still be remembered. Booting sometimes recognized one drive but not both; sometimes neither. Keeping it running so it would be warm or unplugging and replugging drives made no difference. System time fell behind substantially. I replaced a CR2032 battery that was old and probably previously used but not reported by the current machine as low; replacing it with another old battery allowed seeing both HDDs.
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