Restoring OS X from External HD Backup

Hello all - I have a MBP (200gb internal HDD), and a 1TB external USB RAID1 drive. In an effort to reformat my MBP's internal disk, I:

-used Disk Utility to create a backup of my entire internal HDD to my external RAID1, so it would be bootable. Used the standard source/destination feature, and it worked great. No problems booting to the external HDD, and everything looks fine...wouldn't even know I was on a different drive.

-erased my MBP's disk via Disk Utility's erase feature. Worked great, drive is empty.

Now the problem comes when I'm booted to my RAID1, and try to restore the the MBP's disk. If I use Disk Utility's standard restore source/destination tool, I get an error that the disk sizes mismatch, or something like that (presumably, because it's trying to copy a 1TB drive to a 200GB drive). I also tried to just drag all the system-critical folders to to the drive via Finder, but that didn't work either, because the folders copy but I can't boot to it. I tried to make a disk image, but it seems that in Disk Utility, I can't make a customized image by picking and choosing which folders I want to include. I can only make an image of a single folder (which does me no good because I need to restore multiple folders that are all located in the root directory of the drive).


Any suggestions of how I can restore my internal HDD to make it bootable again? OS X is running beautifully well from my external RAID1 as I sit here and type this, but it's understandably making me nervous that my entire system is external right now. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Hmm...that sounds like a good idea, but would the fact that the external is 1TB and the drive I'd be copying to is 200GB be a problem?

 

Nope, SuperDuper! didn't work. It's still trying to squeeze 1TB of information onto a 200GB drive. I guess what I really want to know is how I can get only my essential SYSTEM files and programs (i.e., applications folder, users folder, an system folder), onto the 200GB drive, and have it be bootable. That's really all I'm looking to do.