Newbie's not-so-newbie question RE:Rescue and Recovery

Hello people. I have a Lenovo 3000 N100, with all the third party stuff still installed and all..

Here's what I wanna ask: I want to recover my laptop with its factory settings via a set of Product Recovery disks I made ways back.. I'd do it immediately as this wasn't the first time I wanted to do this, but last time I had the time to buy and burn a bunch of DVD's to back up my documents and everything I want to keep after the reinstall..thing is now I can't do it as there are just too many files to back up if I were to use DVD's.. I was wondering, in the R&R Workspace when I choose to restore my system and the help file it says that there are supposed to be radio buttons both to store desired backups in a protected area in the local harddrive and restore them in the same directory after the reinstall (or somewhere along those lines) and to store desired backups on an external storage device (or, again,somewhere along those lines) but when I get to the screen where I was supposed to see those radio buttons, there aren't any, and what's selected is the option to store them in an external device.. Uhh, yeah, so a little help here?

Or aside from that, is there a way to make my own protected area on my hdd that wouldn't be touched when I reinstall the operating system from the hidden backup partition? Thanks much

 

bummmmppppppp.....

 

Not exactly sure whats going on here, but:
-Is there a reason you can't just copy the files you need onto an external drive? It won't be super fast, but it will be easy and relativly safe. Its always better to have your back-ups on an external disk, so that something like a reformat won't risk over-writting them if you make a mistake.

-Beware of user-burned disks. Turns out the software often makes them wrong, and I know that mine are missing some tiny file that makes them useless, so I hand to download a generic OEM .iso and then add in the Lenovo lisense file myself. It was a huge pain and wasted a lot of time.