Vista Recovery/backup/restore issue

[becranfill]

Hello,

I am new to this forum and hope you can help me please. I'll try to be brief and to the point.

Just bought a new computer with Vista. It crashed yesterday and was advised to "start from scratch" and use recovery tool. Just before doing this it asked me if I wanted to backup my data. Of course I did on an external hard drive. Today I have successfully windows and running and it's new again. Now I'm ready to restore my back up files.

When I use the Vista back up file utility, it doesn't "see" the backup files on my external hard drive. When I go into explorer I can see the backup files on my external hard drive. When I click on the application file (it says it is a "restorewiz application"), it throws me into recovery manager and says, "the file restore wizard helps you restore files that you backed up earlier". So far so good. Then it says "insert the last disk. Please insert the latest disk and continue the restore wizard." There is no option to tell it to look on my external hard drive.

What am I missing? All I want to do is to restore these files which I can see on my external hard drive. They are in the folder "MINWINPC" with file extensions of .fpw. Thanks for any help.

Bruce