Cloning hard drives and dealing with IDE/SATA and 137 gb drive size limitations

[Nomen]

Here's the situation.

I've got a BX-440 Intel P3 motherboard (probably dates to 1995 - 1999 time frame).  I believe originally that win-98 was installed on it, then Win-2k was added.  When booting, there is a boot menu.  Original hard drive was maybe a few gb in size.  Over time the drive was cloned to larger and larger drives, and partions were resized.  Currently it has 3 FAT-12 partitions (each 4 gb in size) and an NTFS partion where Win-2k was installed.  This motherboard has IDE sockets, no sata, and the drives were IDE up until a few years ago, when I cloned the last IDE drive (80 gb) to a 128 gb SSD.  I have a small board that plugs into the IDE motherboard slot and converts it to SATA, so the SSD is connected to that board.  It works fine.  The motherboard probably has a 137 gb hard drive size limitation.

Recently I wanted to clone the SSD, so I brought it to another PC that has SATA ports and booted Ghost 3 from a floppy.  The 128 gb SSD was the source drive, and a 250 gb sata hard drive (some old WD hard drive I had, new still in mylar bag, circa 2007) was the destination drive.  In Ghost I adjusted the NTFS partition on the destination (made it the same size as the source) my intention being that only the first logical half of the 250 gb drive was going to be used to keep everything under the 137 gb boundary.

The cloning went well, but when booting the clone drive on the old motherboard the Win-2k splash screen froze soon after it came up.

Next what I did is to perform the cloning on the old motherboard (with IDE interface using IDE-to-Sata mini converter boards).  The original cloning took 1/2 hour, but it took 2 hours on the old motherboard.  But guess what - the clone drive now boots!

I'd like to know what I can do differently, if anything, when cloning a 128 gb drive to a larger drive (larger than 137 gb) while keeping the logical size under the 137 gb limit (using Ghost booted from a floppy).  When the drives are SATA that is.  My experiment of doing that on an old motherboard with IDE interface and using IDE-to-SATA converter did work, but it's slow.