restoring a disk image to a different system

I recently made a 16 gig image from one of my systems windows XP and tried to restore it to an older system with a smaller hard drive. I'm using 2010 home Acronis. I also tried the trial version of the work station. After trying to run the restore ( which was on 3 dvds ) all I get is prompted to keep switching disks and nothing happens. Is this possible I had done something similar years ago with drive image with no problem except the hardware issues. Any help please