Restore from back up does not recognize time machine drive

Question

My wife's hard drive in her 2010 MB Pro decided to give up the ghost a few days ago, so I purchased a new hard drive for her, booted from the Snow Leopard Install disc that came with the computer. However, after the installation is complete, when it gives the option to "Restore from backup", it will not locate the drive with the Time Machine Backups. The drive with the time machine backups is a dedicated 500 Gig Seagate External, that is set up on the network through our Airport Extreme. When I plug the drive directly into the computer, the drive doesn't even show up on the list. When I plug it back into the router it will recognize it as the Time Machine Disk, but will say "Connection Failed" when I try to connect with it. I have watched several youtube videos and read several blogs, and it looks so easy, simply click on "Restore From Backup" and bang! You're in business, but my drive and its backups won't even show up!
After going through with the intitial set up, I can click on the Time Machine Icon, and choose to view other Time Machine disks, and it shows up there, and I can see about two (2) years worth of back ups; however, each time I boot from the install disks, it still doesn't show up in the "Restore from Backup" mode. Migration assistant shows the files, but when I migrated them, it says that I do not have permission to view the files. Also, when I enter the Time Machine it only shows a blue folder with "Macintosh HD" on it, and when I try to simply "Restore" that folder, it will start transfering files for about an hour (Maybe get up to 10-15 Gigs, and then it will say that it cannot replace or over right "Systems", and then stop the transfer.
Thinking that some of the drives were from when we upgraded to Lion, I redownloaded Lion, and it is more of the same.
I am in a really tight spot here, because I have been faithfully using Time Machine Backups, and was told that if a situation like this ever occurred I would be good to go with a new hard drive, or even a new computer. We have about 80 Gigs (not kidding) of family photos on the computer, and those are precious to my wife, so if nothing else I would just like to get those off of the drive.
If anyone could provide me with any tips as to
1) How to make Restore from Backup recognize the drive; or
2) Migrate the files, but actually have permission to view them; or
3) Any other way to Restore from Time Machine that I may be overlooking,
I would greatly appreciate it.

Answer 1

Well the first thing you should do is have a local professional image the TimeMachine drive to another drive, then you can install Data Rescue on your computer and use that to read the 1's and 0's of the imaged drive directly and recover any files out of the morrase that is TimeMachine.
TimeMachine is a freaking eyecandy abortion, when it screws up, it screws up royally. However it's easy and better than nothing for computer newbies who tend to delete stuff by accident.
Computer professionals prefer "imaging" or "cloning" which makes a exact duplicate of a drive in every detail and accessability. Carbon Copy Cloner is the choice software for that.
If you not comptuer savvy or want to take a risk, then I'd advise you to get a local PC/Mac data recovery expert to recover your files, they are still on the drive and somewhat accessible, but if you fool around too much TM can delete them as it "copies" your present new boot drive. Then data recovery could cost thousands for platter dissection if the TM drive is overwritten/updated by TM software.
So to be safe, get profesisonal data recovery help, and not the clueless types at the Genius bar.
FYI, once a TM drive has been infected with Lion, you can't use it with SL.
So it's best to stop and get a image, then decide to play with the image or allow the pro's to recover your files before they are really gone forever.