BleepingComputer.com: Vista VHD file question

Hey guys. I had a HP notebook (bought 2007) with Vista on. Recently I made a Windows backup (VHD) file on an external drive and also backups of my most important folders. My notebook was stolen from my vehicle (you never think it will happen to you ) and I didn’t lose too much info luckily. There were however some folders that I did not specifically back up, and I believe this data is contained in some way in the VHD back up file, size is about 50 Gig.
I have new HP machine now, also running Vista, with a 250 Gig hard drive. I understand that the image backup can be used to format and restore a drive to make it look exactly like it was before. I do not want to do that however with the system disk on my new machine because I would like to keep the new, virgin Vista installation that I got on my new machine.
Is there any easy way to extract the data to get access to those folders that I forgot to back up? Is it perhaps possible to extract just the data to a folder on my new machine???
Thx