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.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Maybe the external hard drive has a partition table or format that is incompatible with trying to restore a disk to.

Try using Disk Utility to repartition the external drive (be aware that you will lose any data already on the drive). Open Disk Utility, then click on the external drive device (NOT the partition, which appears indented below it) in the left-hand sidebar. Then, click the "Partition" pane. Under "Options..." ensure that "GUID" is selected. then, back on the partition pane, select "1 Partition" from the pull down menu and press "Apply" or "Partition" in the lower-right.

After this completes, try booting from your OS X install DVD again and trying the instructions you were given.