Continued problems with crashed macbook

[BarneyRubles]

Hi, recently I asked a tech about my crash macbook
http://macosx.com/tech-support/laptop-macbook-crashed/344526.html
I didn't have an external hard drive, and by the time I bought one, the support chat thing had expired. But I finally have one now. Anyway, I'm trying to save my files using the external hard drive and the instructions that the tech gave me.
"Don't give up on your files, yet!
If you don't have a backup of those files, then you should attempt to get those files.
Here's what I would do:
Get an external hard drive.
Boot to your OS X installer DVD. Run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. click on your hard drive, and click the Restore tab. drag your internal hard drive to the Source line. Drag your external hard drive to the destination line, then click the Restore button. That might back up your files all in one step. You may need to wait for several hours for that to finish."

I just tried that, and it worked fine until I tried to drag my external hard drive to the destination line. It dragged it over and then let it go on the destination line, but nothing appeared. I was wondering, why might this be?
Thank you for your time.

 

[DeltaMac]

Is your external hard drive formatted so that your Mac can write to it?
For example, if the the hard drive is an NTFS volume, the Mac cannot write to the drive without adding other software to your Mac, such as NTFS-3G.
If you can't write to the volume, Disk Utility won't allow you to add it as a destination
In that event, you can re-format that hard drive as MacOS Extended (journaled) - again using Disk Utility.

 

[djackmac]

I just tried that, and it worked fine until I tried to drag my external hard drive to the destination line. It dragged it over and then let it go on the destination line, but nothing appeared. I was wondering, why might this be?
Thank you for your time.

Did it show a green + sign circle as you dragged it towards the destination line? When you see the + sign circle appear, you need to release or it may not populate the destination box. If you have the box "erase destination" checked, it should take care of any formatting issues so long as the external doesn't need to be repartitioned from a MBR partition scheme to GUID or APM.