Hey, did you ever get your hard drive working? I just did mine, used piclone to copy my SD to it and (eventually) I'm up and running. I had to change 2 things (on the hard drive) to point to the hard drive instead of the SD: /boot/cmdline.txt and /etc/fstab Clone onto it first, then mount partitions to edit files on it.
Full writeup at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=186761&p=1179003#p1179003 I did the onetime programming thing to enable USB boot and I have a recent bootcode.bin. And I suspect a lot of wasted time updating everything else. Still the same Jessie image I spent 10 days downloading last summer, with updates. I ran rpi-update to update firmware.
