Your SATA to USB bridge is keeping the SSD from being seen as a SATA bus device.
I'd try the spare workstation approach I posted about before.... it will be easy if you have a spare but you might not.
You also could try a USB-attached external HDD, and boot off the Acronis CD with HDD inside, capture the image to the external HDD, swap in the SSD, boot from the Acronis CD wiht SSD inside, and clone from the external image to the internal target.
Loading from scratch..... another option, as you note.
Hang in there..... you'll pull this off!