The original system can read and write the reiserfs, so I presume the
copy would have the same drivers.
Unless, of course, some boot process needs to read the root partition
before it has discovered the reiser kernel modules. Is that likely?
Just when *does* the boot process load its modules from /boot? Does
it have to read from /etc first? Could that be the problem?
I still have another empty partition available : /dev/hdb13,
the same size as /dev/hdb12, the root partition for
the copy. I suppose I could make /dev/hdb13 into an ext2
file system, copy /dev/hdb12 into it, and see if that boots.
It would answer questions whether the use of reiserfs is the
problem.