Cannot restore norton's restore

I had an old Dell pc running windows 2003. It crashed, will not stay more than 10 secs. Anyway got a new Toshiba running windows 8, and was relying on the Nortons backup to restore my old files. When I load the disk either before or after asking norton to  restore files, it says it can't read the disk. I had hoped that Norton would do what was promised. I have read that I am not the only one to have this problem. How do I restore?????? HELP