Need advice in setting up a portable external hard drive

Question

Since I travel and am away from home for 4-6 months of the year, I would like to to set up an external drive which I can carry with me and will hopefully contain everything I could possibly need to back up and troubleshoot the iBook while away from home. Toward that end, I have purchased a registered copy of Super Duper, a 250 GB Western Digital notebook drive, and a firewire enclosure from OWC with the Oxford 911+. I have also read the X Lab's Backup and Recovery FAQs and a number of discussion threads. But I have never done anything like this before, and would welcome any advice I could get on specifically how to set up and partition the drive in the best possible way.
Because the internal drive is rapidly filling up with music and photos, I am thinking that the partition for the bootable clone should match the size of the internal drive, which is 120GB.
There are a lot of system discs which came with the iBook, which is the very first iBook G4 that came after the ibook G3. I upgraded the OS to Tiger from Panther, so I don't think I would need to worry about the original 3 Panther discs that contained the OS. But there is a separate disc for the AHT and 8 Software Restore discs as well as iLife 06. I know I can burn safety copies to carry around, but if there is a way to do it, I would like to have the safety copies on the external hard drive. At least if that would be OK with Apple's licensing agreement.
Also, my only diagnostic tools right now are the Apple Hardware Test and the Tech Tool Deluxe disc that came with Applecare. But in the future I might need to acquire others such as Tech Tool Pro, Disc Warrior, Data Rescue II, and possibly something else, so I would want to have my drive set up so that I would be able to boot from any of these.
Part of the drive will just be for extra storage space, in case the internal drive starts to get too full, and some media files will need to be archived to the external drive.
Any help, suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Thanks to both of you for your responses!
It sounds like there may be a consensus on making one partition the size of the iBook's internal hard drive, but I am still not at all certain whether the rest of the drive should be one partition or more than one partition. I probably didn't make myself very clear when I posed the question because I'm not sure I know enough to ask an intelligent question. But I think I need to ask a lot of questions because there is so much that I don't know.
One thing I should mention--I have never in my life partitioned a drive so I really have no idea what's desirable, what's not, or really where to start. So perhaps I should try to describe my concerns a bit better.
Because of a highly unpredictable travel schedule, there is a real possibility of being stuck away from home for an extended period of time. For that reason, I want to be prepared for any possible computer disaster. So that means I want to be able to do on the road the exact same things I can do at home where I have all my system discs and diagnostic tools.
I don't really want to carry the originals around--I'd rather leave them at home locked up in my fire proof safe. I could burn copies to CD's and DVD's, but that would result in a pretty big pile of discs to carry around. Also, sometimes the CD's and DVD's just turn into little gold frisbees over time, and I would hate to need one and find out it had gone south and was unusable. So I had the idea of incorporating everything onto the external hard drive so that if it came to it, I could even do an erase and install.
This may be overkill, but I am very paranoid. I am a fair klutz when it comes to computers. I managed to corrupt my OS twice last year. The first time I was trying to reset my password on the iBook and got completely locked out. The second time I was trying to do an Archive and Install on the MBP and made a real hash of it. So I have a real fear of somehow corrupting the software on the iBook and possibly on the clone as well. So I would like to be prepared for the worst possible disaster.
I like the idea of a separate partition for the Tiger OS, the AHT and Tech Tool Deluxe and any others I may acquire. And the Tiger OS would just be what is on the Tiger retail DVD that I have. One question--the DVD just says Version 10.4. Should I update it to 10.4.11 or just leave it as is?
I'm also wondering about a partition for the software that originally came bundled with the iBook and iLife 06? If I ever had to do an erase and install, I would really want to have this. Hopefully I won't--now that there is actually data on the iBook other than the address book and bookmarks, I am beginning to realize why it's only something to do as a last resort. But I would feel better if I had the option far from home. But if it makes no sense to install these on the external drive, would it be possible to burn a DVD of them on the MBP instead of all those CD's?
Also, how do the partitions show up in Disk Utility? Do you give the partitions names? I really don't have a very good idea how all of this works. As I understand it, I have to partition using the Apple Partition Map and I have to get it right the first time, as you can't change the partitions later without having to erase everything.
Oh yes, I did order the power supply for the drive--thanks to reading about that in another post.
Really, I have been trying to research all this, but so often I don't really understand everything I read. I very much appreciate both of you taking the time to help me with this project.
Many thanks!