How do I boot from an external hard drive if my MacBook Pro only recognizes the internal drive?

Hi there, I recently got the white screen of death (w/ circle slash) on my 13" 2009 MacBook Pro. Most people are saying that it is hard drive failure, so I am trying to boot it from an external hard drive to save some of my data before having it repaired. Unfortunately, every time I press "option" while it boots, it only shows the internal drive on the grey screen. I have my external drive connected, but it won't recognize it. What should I do?
Thanks!

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
You can only start from an external drive if OS X is installed there. If not, it won't appear as a bootable volume because there isn't any operating system inside it.
As you have a Mid 2009 MacBook Pro, it's better to start from the Mac OS X disc that came with your Mac. Insert it and hold the C key while your Mac is starting. After starting, go to Utilities menu > Disk Utility, select "Macintosh HD" in the sidebar and repair it. If you can't get it repaired, take the computer to an Apple Store.
If the hard drive can't be repaired, the only option to recover your files is to use an application as DiskWarrior, but it's expensive and it's not sure that it will work, because it may fail

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easybpw wrote:
can I just replace it with an external drive and load the OS on that and boot from there?
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If so what exactly, step by step, would I need to do?
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If you're reasonably sure the drive is capable of booting your Mac, you need to format it. Start up your Mac from the Install disc (insert it, and hold the "C" key while starting up). After selecting your language, select Utilities, then +Disk Utility+ from the menubar.
Select the drive, select the top line (with the make and size), click the Partition tab and select 1 Partition from the the pop-up menu under +Volume Scheme,+ unless you need more than one.
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Thanks DWB. Being the rash impetuous guy I am I didn't wait for replies and just switched on the macbook after installing the new disk (which was so easy it was unbelievable - had to go and buy a a little torx bit though) to see what would happen.
Blow me down with a feather if it didn't just boot off the external drive all by itself :-O It did come up with the disk was unverified and I could see it in FINDER and I was prseented with a screen to ERASE/RESTORE etc.
When I went to CCC the external drive back to the new hard drive it didn't give show me the new hard drive so I guessed I'd have to do something to format (?) the hard drive.
I don't know if I did the right thing but I went to disk utilities and chose ERASE in the vague hope it would maybe format the disk in some way.
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