Perhaps another dumb question but here goes.

If I  remove the drive that came in the new computer and install  the second blank drive, when I turn machine on will it auto recognize the recovery disks I made and proceed with install or must I do something to prep the new drive?   In other words will the computer recognize it with it being completely blank ? 

I'm probably way overboard on being concerned with hard drive failures but after having been through it I'm trying to be proactive.  The XP crashed drive occurred after a restart on a Windows update.

I had some pictures on the drive I had not yet backed up to my external drive for duplicate protection. They were once in a lifetime shots I could never capture again. 

The Sata adapter I bought had many reviews it was about 50-50 between recovering data or smoking the drive. For $20 I took a risk and it miraculously worked. Not usually my sort of luck with programs and installs. From that point forward I have been very careful about multiple backups and having cloned drives.
For the relative low cost of the additional drives it seemed prudent. It has worked so well on the XP platform I had hoped it would be as simple with Windows 7.

Thanks very much to you and everyone who has helped me with this and confirmed my suspicions that it is the Dell created partitions that are at issue here preventing the straight forward cloning process.