[restore!]

I had an ibook g3 running 10.4.1 on which the hard drive was about to die, so I did a sparseimage backup of the essentials and held onto it.
I've only just managed to replace the drive and installed up to 10.3 on one partition. When I attempted to restore from the sparseimage to the other partition, I got all manner of problems: the image was greyed out (solved be turning it into a .dmg); when I tried to copy the .dmg onto the 2nd, empty partition I got an error (1) message (solved by opening the volume and copying volume-volume).
Thank you past forum posts!
Now, when I attempt to start up from the 10.4.1, I get a major kernel panic, unrolling in different ways each of the 3 times I've tried it.
The question is: does this mean that the original backup was somehow corrupted? or could the problem have arisen after that?
Also, is there anything I can delete or manipulate on that partition to solve this? I can still easily start up from 10.3, but I'd like to move the system up to 10.4 if possible.
Thanks for your help...