Making just 1 USB partition bootable

ignatzatsonic said:

How about letting your app format the whole drive and put your files on it. Then shrink the partition and make a second partition out of the "unallocated space". Most partitioning programs can shrink partitions as needed on an internal drive. Not sure if they can do that on an external.

Quite extraordinarily if I format the partition myself it doesn't boot up in bios even when I set it active. So I was finally able to create a Win7 bootable external hard disk. Here's how I did it in case someone cares:
1. My external HD was formatted in NTFS.
2. Using cmd, I made the external HD active
3. Copied Win7 installation files onto the external HD
4. Wrote the bootsector with bootsect.exe
5. Tested the external HD to see whether it was bootable (it was)
6. Using windows disk management utility, i created two partitions on the HD; one just 5GB and the second the rest of the HD space. After that the first partition contained the installation files while the other was empty and I recopied all my files there.
7. Tested the external HD to see if it still boots. It did.

So in conclusion I now own an external HD which contains two partitions; one for installing Win7 and the other containing all my files.

Thanks