Cannot rebuild a standby server

In the true definition of insanity, I've tried to rebuild a standby streaming replication server using the following steps several times:

1) ensure the postgresql data directory, /var/lib/pgsql/9.3/data, is empty.
2) run: pg_basebackup -h <primary server> -D /var/lib/pgsql/9.3/data
3) manually copy the WAL's from the primary server's pg_xlog directory to the directory specified in the standby's recovery.conf restore_command.
4) rm any artifacts from the standby's new data directory like the backup_label file.
5) copy the saved recovery.conf into the standby's data directory and check it is accurate.
6) Start the database using "service postgresql-9.3 start"

Every time, however, the following appears in the pg_log/postgresql-Fri.log:
<timestamp> LOG: entering standby mode
<timestamp> LOG: restored log file "00000003.history"
<timestamp> LOG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
<timestamp> PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record

All this was originally caused by testing the failover mechanism in pgpool. That didn't succeed and I'm trying to get the servers back to their original states. I've done this kind
of thing before, but don't know what's wrong with this effort. What have I missed?
--
Jay