To every one that was following this thread I thought you might like to know, thanks to Dave, my problem is solved. When I backed up my startup drive to the external firewire drive I also put a couple of other partitions as disk images on it thinking that when I restored it would just restore my original back up, I was wrong, it tried to restore the backup and the disk images and therefore there wasn't enough room and it wouldn't create a startup drive. I think I got it now
I do like the program.
Larry