MAJOR Frustration - trying to clone and replace an IDE drive with SATA

[The Sauce]

So I installed my new SATA drive, formatted and cloned my old IDE drive - piece of cake. Now how the hell do I go from there to actually being able to replace my old drive and boot off of the new one??? BIOS is fine, drive is recognized, Windows boots but stalls halfway in. So I do a Windows repair on the new drive...seems to work. But now the new drive is stuck with it's old drive letter and Windows won't let me change it. So I can't use any of my old installed apps.

Not to mention the fact that with my new 300GB 16mb cache SATA super drive, it now takes 2 minutes to boot instead of 30s with the old drive...and about 60s to shut down. What the hell am I doing wrong here?!?