TIH 2011 "not enough space on the partition"

I need to restore a boot partition from a non-stop archive onto a different hard drive.

The original drive had a C partition of 50gb, of which 19gb was free, and the other partition was at 270gb, but I only need the C on the new drive.

In other words, I'm trying to restore ONLY the 50gb C partition onto a different and larger drive, but I want to retain the original approx. 50gb partition size. The program seems to allow me to select only my C drive as the source, but it's never happy with the destinations I have tried.

The target drive is a 500gb drive, which I have tried to restore to several ways and several times: One, with a fresh, empty 50gb partition, then when that failed, I cleaned off all partitions on that target, and retried, still getting the same 'not enough space' error. Then I created a 100gb partition, but STILL get the same error message. This seems very stupid at this point.

This doesn't seem like brain surgery... anyone have a clue what's wrong now?

Thanks,