System Restore: To different size drive?

Hello!

Thanks for taking the time to read my question.

I have been backing up a 2TB drive using the Windows 7 backup and it seems to be creating an image as part of the backup. Does anyone know if I can restore this image to a different size drive if the amount of data that is being backed up is not greater than the new drive size? Or is it similar to an iso image, which I believe has to go to the same size drive.

The reason is I want to get rid of the 2TB drive with the OS on it and add a raid array that would be approximately 600GB in size, but I don't want to do a full install of Windows, etc. so I would like to use the backup to install it to the raid array. I assume, in theory, this is possible because the array is handled through the bios.

Any help would be appreciated.

WHS
will Macrium imaging do the job?

This is what I am planning to do for myself.
I have an existing 1TB HDD paritioned as shown.
I routinely use MS system imaging for Disk0 to include:
100 MB system reserved, active (Default)
c: 457GB OS, applications etc. (Default)
I understand (and have seen guidelines) to show that basically all I need to do is take a new 1TB disk out of the box (unformatted etc), replace existing disk 0 with the new and restore using the standard procedure.
I also keep Macrium images as a fallback if the Windows images let me down (although I've restored successfully before with the inbuilt windows image).

Nowif I (like the OP) wanted to do the same thing but with a smaller replacement disk then I understood that I could shrink c: prior to MS imaging like has been discussed by others on this forum. Make sure the new partition size is compatible with the new disk and procede as above.
Now if I used Macrium (free) imaging I thought it was happy to restore to a smaller partition thus avoiding the need to shrink c:.

This does not use "cloning" software. What have I got wrong here???

Correct, but to change it to a different drive size and configuration you cannot simply image. You must clone it. Slightly different terminology and not available in the free version.

So in your opinion would my approach to replacing my 1TB drive not work (using MS imaging)?
and
What is cloning adding that is different?

I don't believe you can clone or reimage to RAID or to a pre-partitioned HD - it must be unallocated space.