In general, laptops don't boot from external drives.<BR><BR>Internal 2.5" IDE drives for laptops are very inexpensive. As you can see here, an 18.1GB hard drive can be had for $89.

I'm looking to get an external bootable HDD to plug into my company laptop to run its own OS and be completely independent from the "in laptop" environment. I know my laptop supports bootable USB ...

It’s a convenient feature that, in theory, means you no longer have to carry a Mac OS X Install disc or a bootable external hard drive. But as I explained when Lion debuted, there are still good ...