Booting to an external drive

[eljizzle]

Hello all, first time I've been in this forum. Hopefully someone can help. Thanks

I'm wanting to setup a situation in which I can connect my Western Digital 500GB "My Book" external hard drive to my laptop and have it boot to the drive and install windows and preferably all the other programs I use too. I'm guessing this can be done, its just a matter of figuring it out. I have the "external USB device" as a bootable option in my BIOS but i'm not that familiar with the image/scripting required to make this happen. Basically, when my laptop starts running slow, or doing goofy stuff, I prefer to just format and reinstall windows. This is obviously easy to do, but time consuming to go through and click next and set the time and so on and so on. I'm wanting to just connect the drive, boot to it, come back a few hours later, and have it be done for me and ideally have a few of my main programs reinstalled.

So does this require an "image" of the drive? or can is there a script I can use to install windows and use some sort of flags for the install queries? I'm guessing that if I want it to do the extra programs, that I'll have to do the image thing...

Obviously this is a complex question, but any help and or pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks. Oh and I also wanna be able to keep other stuff on the drive too that will be unaffected by all this. Thanks