Complicated corrupted main drive and lost Time Machine back-ups question

Here's tough one I can't pin down answers to:  I have an iMac Early 2008 running Lion.  The main hard drive system (probably) corrupted over the course of 2-3 months until it became unusable.  I had Sophos on it, but removed it about a month ago and reliability improved but only for about a week.  Finally the hard drive crashed.  I used the Recovery partition while able to have Disk Utility add a second partition to my back-up drive, which contains Time Machine back-ups, my iPhoto folder and a few other files but no system.  I installed Snow Leopard from disk to the new partition, checked the first partition, which seemed fine, then upgraded the Snow Leopard partition to Lion and updated and ran under a temporary user.  Next I explored the main drive, which Disk Utility said was fine, but doesn't always show up.  While in Disk Utility, I noticed that the first partition on the back-up drive showed up as empty!  After some panicking, I've a second back-up drive on the way, but how do I access the TIme Machine back-ups, get my original user back and get access to over 15 years of files that are locked into that user?
My (2nd) back-up drive arrives tomorrow, so I'll able to get to work soon.
Thanks for any help.

Ok so wahat you mean is I need to name a partition "Time machine" in order for TM to back up any volumes and TM will always start with the volume titled Timemachine ?
so as I stated
A. All my OS applications _________Rename this to time machine or can I ues the volume name it is now?
B. All my files for those applications  ---------Once that is done TM will back this up?
C. All My Itunes / Music etc---------Once that is done TM will back this u last?
Also I did a test run and I geet the error msg that the backup disk of my OS needs 1.36 TB but only 1.34 exists. The orignal  OS  disk has only 232GB of data why is tome machine asking for all that space?
I set the partition at 1.34 so there would be way more than enough space to copy.
R

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