Time Machine troubles: Full system restore and Lion.

So the hard drive on my Macbook Pro died and had to be replaced. I took it in, the swapped HD's and got it back. I fortunately have a recent backup on Time Machine that I'm trying to restore.

I turned on the computer (they had reinstalled Lion at the store), and when the setup got to the restore option, my computer wouldn't recognize the external I had plugged in. No problem, I thought, I'll just enter time machine when I get everything up and running, and thats what I did. I entered Time Machine, navigated to the latest backup, hit restore, and followed instructions until the files started transferring to a volume. It said the process would take 2 hours, so I decided to leave it and come back layer.

When I returned a few hours later, however, I saw nothing on the screen. I snooped around and couldn't find a single one of my old files. I went online to look up what apple says to do, but all they have listed is "Follow onscreen instructions" which is useless because I didn't get any. Here's the thing, though, the files are there somewhere. When I checked About This Mac>Storage, It shows that the memory on my Hard Drive is filled to where it should be, but all of it is listed as "Other" data types.

How do I go about restoring these files to where they belong? Do I have to erase the Drive and start over?

Thanks for the help!

I'm not sure what you did to restore.... but here is what you're supposed to do in order to restore the TM backup after receiving your MBP with the new HD loaded with Lion:

Boot the MBP to the Lion recovery partition (command + R), select Time Machine. Press continue and make sure your external drive is attached to the machine. It may take a few moments to mount, then select the drive and press continue. If the drive refuses to mount, then you have different problem.

If the TM drive won't mount properly you're not going to be able to restore from it either way.