Restore can't find the time machine backup

I am trying to restore my system from a time machine backup and the Restore option doesn't recognize my time machine backup. Any ideas on how to force it to see it?
Some background:
I am running Mountain Lion on a 2008 iMac. About 1 week ago, my internal HD failed. I had the hard drive replaced and then hooked up my external HD time machine back-up to restore my system. I started the computer with the command-R option and selected restore from time machine backup. It recognized the hard drive itself, but when I get to the screen to select the backup, it tells me there are no backups on the selected volume. I have run the repair in Disk Utility and the drive checked out ok. I have since installed Mountain Lion again on the internal drive, but didn't bring any files.
Also, while the main computer was down I connected the external drive to another computer and used the show hidden files steps to find some files on the time machine backup and copied them to the other computer.
I don't know if this relates, but I want to share all of the info: Back when the HD originally failed, the computer froze. When my son restarted the computer, it then asked what language he wanted. Then it began a restore process and asked him to select a volume to restore the system to. This is the bad part- He selected a partitioned drive where I had stored some files that didn't fit on the hard drive. It erased that drive and began restoring the system. Of course he didn't tell me about any of this until about 2 hours later, so we lost the contents on that drive. This partitioned drive is the same drive where my time machine backup resides. One partition is the Time Machine backup and the other was external data.
Any ideas? I know I can manually restore the files, but it would be nice to be able to automatically do it. Also, is there a way to read the excluded list? I found the file that this is on...
Thanks,

Inherit a Backup
Inherit a Backup (2)

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