Huge issues using Acer system restore

I own an acer 233xc laptop, the model probably isn't important but it comes with one of those system restore CD's, well three of them to be precise. So having recently had some computer troubles, i backed up all my data and attempted to use the disk.

However, i get a page where it asks me how I want to set up my partitions and it locks up. Sometimes you can't move the mouse at all, sometimes you click 'ok' but the button stays 'pressed' instead of popping back up and the next screen coming up (I hope that made sense).

So basically I can't use the recovery disks as far as I can tell. I've poked around on the CD's themselves and evidently all the data is stored on two files, 60E46W02.ACR on disk two and 60E46W02.002 on disk three. I've copied those on to another PC and proceeded to try and get at them- they're not conventional ISO's, ACE's or ZIP's.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated- I feel like I've been clutching at straws for days now. The hard drive itself is fine, it formats and I can boot to dos and copy files in and out of it, so if I can get into those ACR files then i could easily burn the results to a CD and just copy the uncompressed files over, but getting into those files is the problem.

The partition system itself doesn't seem to be a problem- i've had mandrake 9.2 and redhat 9 on and off it a couple of times and I can always wipe it back to blank and start again.

Note that the only reference I can find on the net to .acr files is the American College of Radiology images files which i assumed to be irrelevant.