Recovery image based disk upgrade - can't restore to backup medium

I thought I was being clever, but I've hosed my system! I wanted to upgrade to a bigger disk. The old disk (I'll call it HD80) is an ancient 80Gb SATA I drive. The new one (HD500) is a 500MB SATA II drive. What I did was:

1. Create a partition on HD500, format it to NTFS, label it D:
2. System image backup to D:
3. Boot Puppy Linux Live USB stick
4. GParted - remove partitions on HD80, repartition, format to NTFS
5. Copy the Recovery Image folder from HD500 to HD80
6. Boot from Windows System Repair DVD
7. Try to restore the recover image to from HD80 to HD500

The recovery starts, but then fails quickly with an error "Unable to restore to backup media" error text might be slightly different from that, but I think the reason might be it's trying to recover to the drive where the recovery image is stored.

Is there any way out of this? Surely these recovery images should be portable?

I was trying to clone the system to the new larger hard disk, so I could retire the old one.

I copied the recovery image using the file manger in Linux. I copied the whole folder, which contains two vhd files for both the 100MB boot partition and the system partition.

I tried the restore using a repair boot DVD created during the Windows backup process, it finds the recovery image fine, just fails to restore it to the new disk. HD80 now only has a single 80GB NTFS partition. My understanding was that recovery would create the boot partition and the system partition on the target disk, HD500.

I think the recovery image is in some way tied to the HD80, is that possible?

Not sure of your method, but what about this:

Make small partition on HD 500---just big enough to hold the image file.

Use Macrium to make an image file of C and System Reserved as they exist on HD 80 and store it on the newly created partition on HD 500.

Boot from Macrium recovery disk and restore from the image file on HD 500 to the remaining unused space on HD 500.

No Linux Puppy. No GParted.

Caveat: I'm not sure if Macrium will let you restore from one partition on a drive to another area on the same drive, even if there is plenty of space.

Or you could try a clone as opposed to an image. Macrium has cloning capability.

I actually tried something like that with the windows tool, but it didn't work. I now don't have a bootable system, the HD80 used to be my system disk, now it just contains the restore image on a singe partition.

I think I might have to do a fresh install, and then recover files by mounting the vhd files.

I blame the software though. I mean, they are just image files, they should be portable or what's the point of them.