Can you make an external hard drive bootable??

Just got a maxtor one touch 250gb hard drive,and its my first experience of an external drive.I`ve already noted that you can partition it,same as an internal drive,but after doing so,it it possible to make one of these partitions bootable??
I`ve got the drive for back ups,i`m planning on partitioning it 50 gig,os back up,and 200 gig data back up,it would be really handy if it was possible to copy over my current c drive onto the 50 gig partition[as this holds my operating system],and make this bootable,if the worst happens and my current set up goes tits up.I was planning on using Norton Ghost to make the backups,and the drive is both USB2 and firewire compliant,then if needed i could simply set the bios to boot from the external drive and all will not have been lost[seems like a good idea to me anyway!]
I`ve not asked anyone about this yet,and this seems to be the place to come for info on such a subject.
Many thanks in advance for any help,i`d really appreciate it!

 

With that device, you may be able to clone your c drive using Maxtor's MaxBlast 3. If it did not come with the drive, you can download it from their site. I have a Maxtor one touch 300gb drive, and I believe that the one touch sofware itself will also let you make a clone of your bootable partition, but I'm not sure if you can actually boot from the one touch with that image.

Good Luck!
EBM

 

welcome!

to answer the bootable question, it depends on what computer you have. i have accidentally left an external hard drive (which incidentally held a winxp install from my laptop) plugged into my desktop and rebooted. it kept trying to boot off of the usb drive. for a while i was dumbfounded, but ten minutes later, i realized that it was trying to boot off of the portable drive! but yeah, this means it's entirely possible.

ghosting the drive won't work, though. you'll probably need to slipstream usb drivers to the windows install disk first. without it, you can't install windows on a usb drive. and if you can't reinstall windows on a usb drive, the usb drive won't boot because it still thinks it should be on the ide channel (which it isn't anymore). or you can stick linux on it. one of the two

 

Thanks for the replies,i`m going to give it a go,and will post up the results.

 

My PC tries to boot off my HDD MP3 player when I have that connected. Very unnerving before you work out what is going on.

 

Go into your BIOS whn you start up your computer. My Gateway laptop has 4 options as to which drive is the bootup drive and which order the other 3 options can be setup. Baz

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