Restoring a time machine from an old hard drive

I recently had a HD failure in my macbook pro.  I sent it back to mac and they put in a fresh new hard drive, i'm trying to use a time machine back up from before the hard drive died but when i go into time machine i can't get the backups to load.  I have a few from the last few days in white and also a few from before that in pink, the actual bacups i want from before the hard drive failure is a dark pink and when i click on it nothing happens, it's as if i can't load these.  Do i need to boot from it or something special or when a HD dies and you put a new one in time machine doesnt work?  Seems stupid if that is the case, so maybe i'm missing something.
Thanks,
James

Thank you for the video link. I did it pretty much exactly the way the young man explained. The one thing I didn't do was click "customize" as he does and unclick the multiple language support and he also clicks "rosetta" to support older programs. I wonder if that's the issue? The guys at Macmall told me that I would need to update the o.s. before I restored. I did that originally but have since (as mentioned before) erased the main drive. I noticed that when he does his install, his external drive does not show up on the list in which you want to install the o.s. on... should I unplug my external? I'm just trying to look at ever detail. I know the recovery file is there. The one thing it (the external) did say before I started posting here was "in progress". I'm not sure what that means? I promise I'm not an idiot. I consider myself an above average user. I usually help other that have issues... but I've yet to restore from a Time Machine back-up and I'm looking forward to learning how to do it.... the right way. I appreciate all of the advice. I have some pretty important files on my external back-up. I am really hoping that this is possible. I'm beginning to think the external is where the issue lies. The "in progress" next to the file name concerns me. I know there's a lot of data on the drive because it's nearly half full. So there's stuff there....
Deep breath in...... reeee laaaaaaaxxxx

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