Booting from External Hard Drive (Time Machine)

I just learned that my hard drive is failing. I haven't backed up my data for a while, so I bought a new 1 Terabyte Seagate Drive for Mac. It's one of the new models that don't need a power cord; you just connect it to your computer.
Anyway, a guy at the Genius Bar told me that I can use Time Machine to create a virtual clone on an external drive. I later realized that I might be able to boot up with my external drive and work with my cloned hard drive if my internal hard drive. I've done that with Carbon Copy Cloner before.
Anyway, that's my main question - can one boot up a MacBook Pro on a virtual clone created by Time Machine instead of using the internal hard drive? If so, how do you access it? I think I recall having to hold down a key (Option?) while the computer is booting up, which forces it to give you a choice of hard drives.
One more question: I've backed up some files on my new external drive - about 200 GB in several folders. My internal hard drive is 750 GB, of which about 180 GB is free. In other words, I need about 775 GB space on my external hard drive (570 GB for a virtual clone of my internal drive and 200 GB for the files I've already copied to it. Since it has 1 TB of space, that should be a breeze.
But can I use an external hard drive when it already contains files? In other words, will enabling Time Machine wipe out the files I've already copied to my external drive? Ordinarily, it wouldn't be a problem; I'd simply be replacing some folders with ALL the contents of my internal hard drive, including those same folders. However, I'm a little conerned because my hard drive is failing. I'm just worried that Time Machine might erase the files on my external drive, then poop out before it's finished creating a virtual clone.
So those are my main questions - can I enable Time Machine without wiping out files already copied to an external hard drive, and, once I've copied my entire internal hard drive to the external drive, can I boot up with the external drive and work on it? Thanks.

Hmmmm...I don't know what you mean by "restored," but it sounds like I'm out of luck (my OS X version is 10.7.5). It sounds like I need to purchase another external hard drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable clone on it, right? And could someone remind me how you access multiple hard drives when booting a computer? I remember you have to hold down a particular key(s) while it's booting.
Thanks.

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