Installing windows and booting from external drive

I just got a Seagate 250gb external drive. I only have cords to connect it to my I-mac with usb cords from its dock but the drive itself has a firewire port. What i want to do is install windows xp onto the seagate drive so the drive can stay Windows formatted and my mac drive can stay mac formatted so both OS's will run at peak efficiency. The only reason i want to be able to boot up from the drive is so i can use my I-macs hardware but be able to play my PC games in its windows OS.
How do i accomplish this?

Assuming it's an Intel iMac since you're installing Windows®, Intel Macs can boot off of USB, but...
USB2 is slow compared to Firewire/400 even, about 1/2 to 2/3rds the spedd, so FW would be better.
How to format your disks...
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html
Open Disk Utility, format the external MacOS Extended Journalled, and don't forget the GUID partitioning at the bottom of that link.
Then...
Get carbon copy cloner to make an exact copy of your old HD to the New one...
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
SuperDuper...
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
Or the most expensive one & my favorite, Tri-Backup...
http://www.tri-edre.com/english/tribackup.html
Clone your internal to the External.
Reboot and hold the Option Key down at bootup & select the external drive to boot from, test it all out.

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