I agree on using Acronis. Used it for a number of years at work and it saves a lot of headaches. I used it at home as well to clone a smaller drive and re-image to a larger drive. IIRC, Acronis will clone and restore to the same size or larger drive.

As for your issue, Dell may have some help or utility that allows you to create your own install disks from the restore partition on your machine....not positive though.

As for what you are experiencing, is Acronis looking at a Drive ID? Or is it looking at a specific partition. It has been awhile since I used it, but I thought it did images by Drive letter. If it is doing it by Device ID, then it may be looking at both partitions (restore and operating) and causing it to fail.