OpenSUSE Install :: Unable To Login After Replacing Hard Drive?

I am running OpenSuse 11.4 with Gnome3, with 2 hard drives. One is for the system and has three partitions - root, swap, and home. The second is only data storage. Last week I started getting popups stating I had a hard drive going bad. I checked SMART status in disk utility and had several bad sectors on the system drive, so I cloned the drive to a new one with Clonezilla. Here is where everything went kooky. When I booted the new disk I had a ton of errors at boot along the lines of unable to find a drive. Upon closer inspection I realized the the system located the drives by device id instead of the traditional /dev/sdx. So I started playing with grub settings but never could get it to stop looking for the old hdd. Next, I popped in my net install disc and found I could do an upgrade install which proceeded normally. When I rebooted, no more boot errors, but I get to the black screen with spinning cursor and it will not proceed any further, I even let it run overnight and when I woke up, spinning cursor. As for troubleshooting, I was able to CTRL+ALT+F2 to a console and log in as root successfully but not as a user. When I try to log in as a user, I enter my username, then password, the "have a lot of fun" flashes by quickly and I am returned to a login prompt. I logged in to the console as root and created a new user and tried logging in again, but same thing. I am able to do an ls -l on /home/mike and all my files are there and the listed permissions look ok. I am at a loss as to what to try next. My old hdd will still boot, I just pulled it to reduce risk af data loss. I have never used auto yast before but I always see the prompt for it during an install. Can I clone the system with auto yast on to a different hard drive. Does it strip the by-device-id from the image? Which logs should I check?