I think that the NTLDR was a fluke cause by BIOS boot issues and non-optimum Boot.ini settings based on drive swapping, etc. I am now overriding BIOS boot settings via F8 and catching the Boot.ini menu to force the intended boot device.

I did another experiment and put the old/working drive is slot 0 and the cloned drive in slot 1. Booted 2K from slot 1. After 2k booted (and found and installed new hardware) I was able to access the cloned drive in slot 2 and ran CHKDSK on all partitions with no errors. This apparently shows that the 2K can read the other drive without issue. I would think that this would tend to rule out hardware incompatibility between 2K and the new drive.

Next I put the cloned drive back in slot 0 and booted from the Win 2K CD into the repair console. From here things went downhill in a hurry. The repair console found C: drive but that is about it. Attempting to run CHKDSK results in an AUTOCHK.EXE could not be found. Attempting to a simple DIR command yields "error occurred during directory enumeration".

Apparently there are some disk issues that the boot process AND recovery console can't handle...