I need some lizard help if you please.

I got home, fired up my laptop yesterday and it wigged out. Next thing I know, I had the blue screen of death and then a Compaq window opened up informing me that it will have to re-install everything and would I like to back up my files?

So I ran out, bought a 16Gb USB drive and watched for a few hours while it loaded my stuff.

Now I don’t know how to restore it to my newly squeeky clean system and I get an error message telling me that “Backup has not been set up on this computer. An administrator must first create a backup before you can restore files.” There three years of pics, tax info and files I desperately need.

Any assistance is gratefully acknowledged and received.