I've done the following:

• created a time machine backup from a mac mini with a 1TB HDD (only used about 40GB).
• replaced the disk with a previously used, working SSD - Samsung EVO 850, 500GB.
• time machine restore - seemed to go smooth.
• booted up the machine.

Current state is Progress bar full with apple logo, stuck all night.

I've done a verbose boot, and could see the following errors:

localhost com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.metadata.mds) <Notice>: Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out for 10 seconds.

Trying to load in single user mode gives the following errors:

failed to locate mount-on path: /private/var/vm Failed to mount vm volume (2)
failed to mount vm volume!BootCache: Root disk is an SSD, not caching

If there is any way to extract errors from the log, I could post them here. Let me know in the comments, If I can improve my question.