problem restoring from Lion Mbp onto older macbook

[cbrandt]

Is there a reason that I can't do this because of hardware? Is there a problem restoring a system with Lion onto a 2006 macbook? When I try to boot up from my SD backup (1 of 3 partitions on an external drive) I get a circle with a line through it. So I tried to follow the your manual instructions but within disk utility I can't select the full backup to restore. Everything is greyed out.
Cindy

[cbrandt]

I restarted and this time I could drag the sd backup to source but because it is in a partition which is larger than the old macbook drive it wouldn't work. I checked and the data would fit but the partition is too big. I guess I could replace the hard drive in the macbook but before I do that, is there any other reason I might not be able to restore from the SD backup made with Lion OS X?

[cbrandt]

Well I guess I can't do this. I tried using the disk utility route to restore from my macbook air since that had a smaller hard drive. Everything seemed to go well until I tried to restart and got that same circle with a line through it. So again I am wondering if it is some hardware reason I can't do this. THis is an intel MAcbook which I thought could have Lion.

Maybe I will try reinstalling Leopard and then upgrading to snow leopard and then Lion that way.

[dnanian]

You can't just "drag" it - how, exactly, are you restoring?