While trying to recover to a smaller hard drive,I created partitions for recovery,system etc... and I could not restore to the partitions even though they were the same size or larger than original,but when I erased the partitions and restored to unallocated space it worked fine. The program would run and copy some files,say succeded,then report no space, cancelled due to error. It seemed to be trying to create the non selected partitions even though they were not selected.
I would try to restore one partition at a time, all to unallocated space and in each case adjust the size of the restored partition (may be not possible in some cases).
That's how I ended up restoring the drive,but I was wondering why it didn't work the other way. Thanks for the reply.