need secondary bootable disk

[soalvajavab1]

As a safegurad since my notebook hard disk is make some big clicking
nosie, I want to have my external hard drive becomes bootable so just
in case I can not boot my computer from regular C: drive I can press F8
or something like that then choose to boot from G: drive ( my external
HDD ) and can see my stuff in c: d: g: ... Is this possible? Let me
know..I have stuff in my external HDD so preferly I do not want to
format it.

 

[Guest]

Some newer bios support booting from a external ( USB ) device but you have
to load a os onto the desktop and set the boot.ini file to reconize teh drive
as external it would probley be kind of hard you would have to install xp on
to your system on the external i think it could be done it would take awhile.

 

[soalvajavab1]

My notebook is IBM Thinkpad T20 a bit old, probably does not support
USB 2.0 external. Again guys, the problem is my main hard drive start
clicking and few times it did not boot..so I am thinking somehow I can
boot from a DVD, External Hard Disk, CD etc. if it dows not boot? Can I
have a bootable CD?

Another solution maybe is if Ghost Software copy EVERYTHING, I mean win
registery, windows software , my whole corrupted HDD to my external
drive and then I buy a new Thinkpad Hard Drive and put them back? IS
that possible, although I try not spend money to buy another HDD now
because this notebook is old. My prefrence is the first solution

PLease advice guys..Regards