System Image Recovery

The hard drive on my Inspiron N5050 crashed.  I had made a Dell factory backup on flash drive and a sysem image backup on an external hard drive.  I also have a separate regular backup of files on the external drive.

I bought a new HD (equal in size to the original) and tried to use the system image backup to format the new HD; I got a message:  bmrui.exe Application error. The instruction of oxfff06494 referenced memory @ 0x0000000. The memory could not be read. Recovery Option failed.

There are system backups for two different computers on the external drive, so I had renamed them to keep them separate.  When using the SI for the Dell, I renamed it to the original file name, but no success.

So I used the Dell Factory backup from the flash drive to format the HD.  This worked to install Win 7, etc. but when I tried to use the regular backup to restore the files, all I got were empty files and folders.

What am I doing wrong?

The Users from the old setup are not visible except in Explorer (none of the files/folders can be accessed by Users in the new setup)

I'm thinking I should just start over with the Dell backup on the flash drive and make a clean install of all the programs, but how can I access the old files/folders?

Any help would be  appreciated.