Need help repairing bootable external drive permissions

I, like some of the other posters I have read, have messed up the permissions on a bootable external drive.
I don't have direct access to my home computer right now so I set up an external bootable copy of my personal account, so I can basically run a copy of my own personal computer from anyone elses mac. And when I get back home I will be able to copy back across any new files.
The set up was working great till I realized that my external drive was completely readable, and writeable by anyone who turned it on as a peripheral disk while logged in on the main computer if the computer was booted up on it's own startup disk.
If my external was set as the startup disk, then my password and account kept everything secure.
So anyway, not really knowing what I was doing I, using the show info command, changed the group permission for the whole disk/volume from admin to my username. Now unfortunately I cannot startup using my external disk; the whole system goes straight to Kernal. And all my files are still totally assesible to any one logged in on the computer using its own start up disk.
Can you help me with the commands, to first repair the group permission so my disk is bootable again, then second so that I can prevent anyone with out my password access to any files on the disk?
Thanks alot!

Can you help me with the commands, to first repair the group permission so my disk is bootable again, then second so that I can prevent anyone with out my password access to any files on the disk?
On another machine, open the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder, select your drive in the list of disks, and then click on the Repair Permissions button; other solutions are available if this doesn't work.
Your two goals are mutually exclusive; there is no way to restrict access to an entire disk to yourself while maintaining the ability of that disk to boot Mac OS X. Your home folder can be protected in this way by changing the permissions on the item inside /Users/ with the house icon, or by turning on FileVault in the Security pane of System Preferences.
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*http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2311807&tstart=0*
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/9014.html
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