Tricky restore 2009 MBP from Disk Utility Image

sorry if this is too long, but the path I have chosen has left me here: I have a 17" MBP 2009 (last one before unibody), dual partition (Mac/Windoze 7), the Mac side was problematic, ended up with the dreaded Invalid Sibling Link error. Booted fine in Bootcamp, though. Couldn't restore/repair Mac side in Disk Utility or using variants of "fsck_hfs -r/dev/disk0s2" or even install disk. Opted for a new internal drive to be safe. Before old drive fully crashed/seized was able to sucessfully use Disk Utility to make a backup disk image. ( I do have another "Data Backup 3.0" backup of just my user account elsewhere as well). Problem now is, I successfully restored the disk image onto the new drive using a remote USB2 case. I saw/could mount the whole system and could browse the files successfully. After this, I then decided to swap the drives internally. Upon reboot, same previous issue is back - obvious OS issue, not drive issue. Some directory is beyond repair, however I could not do a new clean install or modify any settings, etc., the problem has been paid forward. Ugh. I erased the new (now internal) drive (again), repartitioned it (again), successfully loaded Mac OS onto the main partition and from there attempted to "restore" the saved disk image to the backup partition (for file salvage purposes). No go. Now it says it's a size issue, yet I have 50 Gb extra (on the extra partition) beyond what the Disk Image size is. At this point, I can restore all my files, photos, docs, etc.from my other backup, but it is the settings, applications and other system based stuff that I wanted in place. Does anyone have any other suggestions for a restore ? Thx in advance.