Restore System Image

Hi, my work required me to have my laptop reformatted but I made a recovery image in Control Panel -> W7 File Recovery and on the left pane Create a System Image. I saved it to my external drive, ~100GB in size.

Sent my laptop in, came back blank W7 image. I reinstalled W8 and went into Control Panel and W7 file recovery but it says Windows Could not Find a Backup for this computer. My drive is attached, visible, none of the files were modified. When I reinstalled W8 I used the same Computer name. I also tried doing it from boot in the advanced section where you can select restore image but also it cannot find it.

I can mount the image in W8 and see all of my files and access them, but I'd rather just use this image and have all my programs and whatnot already installed.

Any ideas?

See if this helps: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/9064-system-image-recovery-restore-image-computer-windows-8-a.html