Vista - Reinstalling the system recovery files made just before system rec

Please can anyone help me with the following.

I have a HP laptop with Vista installed, and found today that it would not
boot up, so had to enter the system recovery procedure. I chose to back up
all of my files and these saved on to my portable storage drive, Vista
reinstalled nicely, the problem was fixed, but now I want to put the files
back on my pc and cant figure out how.

If I go to restore files in the control panel, I'm told I have no earlier
files to restore, so I'm just left with a 'shortcut' on my desktop to
c:/system recovery files and have no idea how to get them back!!

Thanks