Help - Rescue and Recovery cannot see files in backup set...

[puiumeu]

Please can anyone help me?
Excuse my lack of history I lost my username and password when my drive crashed. Also please excuse the length of this description but I have tried to include anything that may be of importance.
After driving home the other day, I took my Z61t out of my bag to find it ON and RED HOT…. Vista Business was unresponsive so I had to power down by holding the power button. After letting it cool for about an hour I attempted to turn on only to be greeted by a beep/buzz/beep from the hard drive (a Seagate Momentous 320.3).
I had made a FULL Rescue and Recovery Backup to DVD the previous weekend so after sourcing a replacement drive I ran a full restore.
After the restore was complete I noticed one of my partitions was missing! I attempted to restore the partition manually as a file restore but after placing in the FINAL disc from the partition backup Rescue and Recovery sees the backup set but after pressing next the backup shows no files. I have 5 DVD’s with data chunks but nothing appears in R&R? The other 2 partitions and the recovery partition restored perfectly.
I then went to my previous backup to find exactly the same thing. Lenovo supports only help was that R&R can only restore 2 partitions including the recovery partition so that’s 1!
Is there any way I can restore the data without R&R or any tricks other users are aware of?
The partition R&R is refusing to restore is of course my data partition while the programs root and scratch partitions have restored ok…
Thanks in advance.
Al.