[Tfug] Booting External Harddrive

[Charles R. Kiss]

Say one is leaving town for Thanksgiving, and one doesn't want to take 
one's laptop.

Is it possible, instead to take ones external harddrive (200GB) that 
contains boot, swap, and operating system partitions?  Like a portable 
operating system disk with personal data one can take on the road, say 
to your parents house during the Thanksgiving holiday, plug the USB into 
back, change the BIOS settings to boot the external harddrive, into the 
installation menu, etc. 

charles