How do I restore the entire system from a Time Machine external drive?

Hello everyone,
Up front - I have searched through numerous threads but have not yet been able to solve my problem - even though it is presumably easy for many.
So... I had to bring in my late 2009 27" iMac to Apple to replace the hard drive - mine was one of the thousands affected by the defective Seagate 1 TB disk recall. I was told that the disk would be cloned, but nevertheless I made a full system backup with Time Machine to a dedicated external hard drive.
A week later and I now have my iMac back - but when I boot, I only see a white screen with a pointer, so it appears that the drive was not cloned - but that I now have a blank 1 TB disk, correct?
I have also tried booting with the external drive attached, thinking that the dedicated Time Machine external drive would allow me to boot directly from it and restore the system if need be - I booted with CMD+R, tried again with ALT ... no luck.
And I cannot find my Mac OS DVDs...
So... is the drive blank, or am I missing something here?
If so, how can I boot from the external Time Machine drive, or is that not possible either?
Any pointers greatly appreciated, thanks very much in advance.

Call Apple to get replacement DVDs > http://support.apple.com/kb/HE57
1. Insert the Mac OS X DVD and press C key while your computer is starting.
2. Go to Utilities menu and restore the backup.
You should have made a clone instead of the backup because Apple gives the hard disk without OS X

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For detailes TM support post in the forum for your OS rather than the iphoto forum
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Note especially
Restoring data from Time Machine backups
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Note: Dates in pink indicate the data resides on your Time Machine backup device. Dates in white indicate the data resides on your Mac. In OS X Mountain Lion and Lion, portable Macs have the feature of local snapshots. See thisarticle for details.
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Hi guys and gals,
I have a October 2011 MBP running OSX lion (10.7.2), with 2 internal drives (the main drive is a 120gb SSD, the optic drive has been replaced with the original 750gb HDD that came in the computer). I use the SSD for all of my system files, with the HDD being used for my user account, which has my photo and video libraries on them.
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Chris W oz wrote:
when it comes up with the "preparing to copy message" it hits ~24000 files and doesn't go any further.
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