I don't know NT at all well, but if it's anything like Win9.x then I'm not surprised that your drive won't boot. The BIOS should sort out the HDD parameters on AUTO if the dive is jumpered properly. But Windows tries to wake up, looks around it and finds that just about everything that it is expecting to see in Device Manager (particularly under System Devices) isn't there or is different and promptly has a permanent nervous breakdown. This isn't DOS y'know.
You can occasionally succeed in transferring Win9.x to a new machine by deleting everything in Device Manager and promptly shutting down. When it tries to wake up Windows will be very confused and (if it doesn't lock up) will demand it's installation disk and spend quite a while sorting itself out. You may or may not get a stable OS out of it.
"..may be unsolvable without re-installing NT4 on the drive in the newer PC" is right.