How to do a fresh restart of Time Machine (after HD swap & deleting backup)

Question

Yesterday I upgraded my macbook's HD. There seemed to be a lot of ways to transfer my system to the new HDD, so I went with inserting the new HD, put the old HD in a USB enclosure, booted from OSX cd and told Disk Utility to restore from the original HD on usb. It took the little guy a few hours but then everything was up and running peachy. So far so good.
Then I turned Time Machine back on, and it wanted to make a complete new back up. I had read about that, so I decided to not waste 100s of GB on a second full back up and went ahead and formatted it... thinking that TM would start from scratch and everything would be fine.
But the backup got stuck on 26 GB for 3 hours. The TM widget (tx 2 Pondini) told me that it was waiting for the index to be ready and I stopped the backup. I went back to TM pref. and redid the setup, but when I clicked my backup drive in "change disk" TM told me that I'd better not because it is the same drive the original data is on!?! (screenshot).
It is listed in the 'do not back up' list as it should. Just to make sure, I formatted the backup volume again (ext. journaled)  and verified it: all clear. Though for some reason there is still 200 MB of data on there, not visible in Finder, but if that's not causing the problem I can live with that.
I'm getting confused here... How do I to fix this? Or should I just ignore the message and go ahead?
How should I have set up a new TM from scratch?
Help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Beautje wrote:
(I'm not sure whether TM said preparing when I stopped it, but nothing seemed to be happening.)
No, it had finished preparing, and started copying (once it logs how much space is needed, it's ready to copy), and had in fact copied 26.7 GBs.
My display had gone black, and I've set it to go to sleep when the computer has been inactive for 30 min. The whirring sound was still there.
That's fine; display sleep won't interfere.  If you move your mouse, it should just display.
Should I be more patient,
No, something is definitely wrong. 
would it really take so long do the deep traversal etc.? Does it need to do that at all when there's nothing on the disk? (that is visible in Finder)
It didn't do one at all (there's no message about it).  Those are only required when the previous backup failed or was cancelled, or there was a very large volume of changes, like an OSX update.  It was doing an initial, full backup.
What we can't tell yet is whether the copy was running terribly slow, or whether it had hung at the 26.7 GB mark. 
When you have some time, erase the TM drive and start again.  This time, watch the progress bar: note the time when it starts copying (xx GB of yy GB), and see how far it gets in, say, half-hour increments.  The first ones will be rather slow (it's copying tens of thousands of mostly very small files, and there's a lot to do for each one).
Overall, it should run at, very roughly, 50-55 GB per hour for the whole backup (but again, considerably less at first;  when it gets to your home folder and starts copying, say, large video files, it will speed up greatly).
It may not update the count continuously, but may seem to be going spurts;  there's a problem only if it stops for several minutes.