Time Machine Restore Problem. PLEASE HELP!!!

Alright so I am new to these forums. Here is my conundrum.

Today, I bought a 500gb Western Digital 5400rpm hard drive to replace the 160gb hard drive in my MacBook (a late 2008 2.0ghz unibody macbook). My MacBook has Snow Leopard 10.6.2. on it btw. I took the new hard drive, placed it in an enclosure and formatted it to Mac OS Extended (journaled), and turned off and replaced the old drive with the new one. I then took the disk that came with my mac, inserted it, and chose to restore from Time Machine to copy it to my bigger hard drive. It finished and, as the computer restarted I got this error, which an Apple rep. told me was a "Kernel Panic" or something along the lines of that. He told me to try clean installing Leopard onto the new HDD to see if it would work. I did and, sure enough, it worked, When I chose though to restore my files from Time Machine when it finished, it said that "Time Machine could not restore the files because the version of OS X on the Time Machine disc is different than Leopard 10.5." Thus, to work around this, I installed Snow Leopard (the $29 upgrade) and it booted into SL fine. Here's the problem though. It is a clean version of Snow Leopard and I cannot get my Mac restored how it was. Migration Assistant will only move files but my computer was very personalized and I want to restore it from Time Machine. Apparently though, the only way to do that is through the original disk that came with the machine and I cannot do that as it won't recognize the fact the the Time Machine backup is of an Snow Leopard MacBook and the software to re-install OS X is for Leopard only.

So I ask of you, what can I do to restore from Time Machine now? I can't figure it out! Thank you A TON if you can figure this out!

Update:

I've given up on it. I cannot get it to work. I have tried many times again but still... nothing. I've downloaded SuperDuper! now and am almost done making the clone of the drive. When it's done, I'll pop it in and, if it still doesn't work, I'll be almost sure it's the HDD's fault and not my MacBook's or Snow Leopard's. Just keeping you posted...

Thanks

Ok so SuperDuper! finished, I put in the 500gb WD drive and, would you look at that, it works flawlessly. Everything is perfect, right where I left it! Man, what a great program. Well, I guess I figured this out myself.

One thing though... judging from how Time Machine acted trying to restore my drive (and failing), this won't work if, god forbid, my new drive ever crashes. I will be screwed then. Suggestions on what to do?