I have a plan ... to separate PCLOS from XP

[TBercaht]

If you look closely at the cable, you will see the far end connector has a little twist or cut in one of the cores in the ribbon cable. That is the cable select line. It can only work when the cable is connected correctly. If the drives are physically too far apart to connect them correctly, I would suggest moving them closer together.

It is usual, and I think necessary, when connecting a hard drive and an optical drive on the same channel, to connect the HDD as master. Many BIOSes will not function correctly if they are reversed.

I think that's likely to be the problem.

kjpetrie,  Thank you for your reply.
The drives are too far apart to be connected correctly & there are no other open bays in the case.
This experience has given me more incentive to transplant the entire system into a case better suited to my needs (i.e. - I need to move the drives closer together).
I had not heard about configuring the HDD as master & optical drive as slave when they share a channel, but I will keep it in mind.

Resolution
I have replaced the ribbon cable that once connected the motherboard to both the optical drive & HDD with one that connects the motherboard to the optical drive only.
I have used the IDE/SATA converter to connect the new HDD to the SATA 2 connector on the motherboard (original HDD connected to SATA 1).
The system can now boot using either HDD.
All three operating systems (two PCLOS) are bootable.

I installed KDE 2011-09 to the new HDD to eliminate (reduce) the possibility (probability) of a mistake on my part during the copying process being the root cause of my difficulties.

Since a hardware configuration error (on my part) turned out to be the culprit, I probably could have used the transferred system had I not erased it to make room for KDE 2011-09.

My (revised) plan is to configure the new installation to meet my needs.
Once that is done, I intend to proceed from step 18 (Restore, Recreate, Resize, Verify).
Both (PCLOS) systems will be kept updated until I remove the original.

Edit 03-Feb-2012:
Added following [modified] quote(s) for reference, as I intend to upgrade the kernel on this machine in the future...

>snip<
Give us more details about Your gear. For example output of

Code:

lscpu

>snip<
and

Code:

lspci

>snip<
would be good.

If Your machine is Intel based I would go for the 38.8 bfs kernel but if it's AMD K8 based I would go for 38.8 a64 kernel...

Another thing... About the kernel versions - I would go for the most recent version from repository 38.8 but You can install and test both - they will be available in Your grub. There is a chance that some of the modern equipment might work better with latest kernel versions. There is a chance that some older equipment might be problematic with newest kernels - it rarely is but sometimes it happens... Many things are to be considered / tested.

Regards. I hope I have helped.

Andy

Yes, Andy, you have helped.  Thank you.  

PS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

"Linux

The Linux kernel includes full PAE mode support starting with version 2.3.23,[7] enabling access of up to 64 GB of memory on 32-bit machines. A PAE-enabled Linux kernel requires that the CPU also support PAE. As of 2009,[8] some common Linux distributions have started to use a PAE-enabled kernel as the distribution-specific default[8] because it adds the NX bit. "

Look into the flags in the output of the console command "cat /proc/cpuinfo".
ie:

flags      : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon bts aperfmperf pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr pdcm dts

Thank you for that command line, Melodie.   

Regards,

Darryl