Lion won't install to 2008 iMac

I think I'm in a sort of OS twilight zone...
I have two iMacs, an old 2008 model (24 inch) and a new 2012 27 inch or whatever size the bigger one is. The new one is running Mountain Lion. The old one's hard drive died. I'm 99% sure it was running Lion. It had a recent Time Machine back up.
So I bought and installed a new hard drive. Now I needed to install an OS. Hmmmm. Can't install from the TM back-up. Can't install Lion or try to install Mountain Lion since I got those through the app store. So I dig through my boxes of old stuff and find a retail Leopard install disk. I do have a retail Snow Leopard disk but can't fnd it.
So I install Leopard on the old machine. Works beautifully. Only I forgot it doesn't have the app store. I try to import the TM back up but no go since the TM back up was done in a newer OS than Leopard. Well, OK...
So on the new Mac I download the installs for both Lion and Mountain Lion from the app store. Copy them to an external drive and try to use them on the old iMac. Neither will install. Both say that they are not supported on the old machine's architecture. Very odd since I believe Lion was previously installed on this machine and I believe the TM back-up was done in Lion.
So I'm stuck, I think. How the heck can I restore my TM back-up? Why won't Lion install when my machine seems to meet the specs? This isn't how it should be...
Help!
--Darin

So long as your Mac definitely supports Lion take a look at Pondini's help pages, 'cos it sounds like it should work following these instructions:
http://pondini.org/TM/14.html

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