On Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:58:08 -0700
John Jason Jordan <[email protected]> dijo:

>On Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:09:27 -0700
>wes <[email protected]> dijo:
>>my first guess is that the installer installed GRUB onto one drive,
>>but the BIOS is attempting to boot the other drive. you could try
>>swapping the cables going to them, or unplugging them one at a time
>>til it boots (or doesn't). I agree that it should have worked once you
>>repeated the installation to the other drive.

Update:

I have Xubuntu installed and working fine on one of the 320 GB drives.
In the process I also tried installing it on the other drive. If both
drives are plugged in during boot there is no way to get Xubuntu to
boot; it gets hopelessly confused and I get the Grub menu.
Unfortunately, the drives are identical except for serial number, and
Grub just assigned uuid numbers to both, without bothering to tell me
which uuid is assigned to which drive. In sum, the only way to boot is
to leave one of the 320 GB drives not plugged in. After doing that, and
using Rescue Mode to update Grub, it now boots fine from one drive, and
I have fixed that installation the way I want it. 

I also discovered that I can hot-plug the other 320 GB drive. With
Xubuntu running I can just reach into the case and plug the other 320 G
drive in. Xubuntu automatically mounts it and presents a file browser
window for it. I find this amazing. Of course you can hot-plug USB
drives, but I am surprised that you can do it with internal drives as
well. But note that the power cable was always connected; all I pulled
during boot and plugged in after booting was the data cable.

Having discovered this I used Palimpsest to remove the partitions from
the hot-plugged 320 GB drive, and then formatted it as one partition
ext4 for data storage. Now I should be able to leave it plugged in
during boot and Xubuntu should not get confused.

Having discovered that I could hot-plug the other 320 GB drive I tried
it with the 1 TB drive. But the result was not what I hoped for. The
disk light came on and stayed on continuously and Xubuntu did not
mount the drive. I don't know what this means, and since the drive is
not visible to Xubuntu, or even the BIOS, there is no way to do
diagnostics on it. The only thing I can think of to try is to install
it in another desktop computer with SATA ports to see if it is
recognized. 

And when I pulled the 1 TB drive out of the case I discovered that the
label says it is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 and that it is a
"Certified Repaired HDD." That is because the original failed and
Seagate replaced it under warranty. If this drive has failed also that
makes the fourth Seagate drive that I have had fail within the last
couple of years, and it also assures Seagate a top position on my
"Do Not Buy" list.
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