Can't Restore System Backup To Different Drive Type

My system drive is an IDE drive. I want to restore the system backup to a sata drive. I removed the ide drive, booted from the whs 2011 dvd, and tried to restore just the c: drive to a sata drive. I get the following error:

"No disks that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found"

I have not excluded the drive. The sata drive is larger than the original.

Can the system backup only be restored to another IDE drive?