Partitioning Mac for Bootcamp Without Reformatting HDD

Question

Hello, I hope this is the correct area to start this discussion.
I'm trying to figure out how I can install windows via boot camp, without reformatting my HDD (or use of installation CD).
I'm currently on tour around the U.S., and my installation disks are at my home address.
As a roady photographer, access to my computer and Photoshop is essential to me, and its very important that i can continue to use my mac pro through out the remainder of this year, it is how I make most of my living wile out on tour, so I hope this explains how important it is that i do this right the first time.
Its kind of overwhelming, and I don't know where to start.
I am Tech savvy, but not qualified, my experience has been the above average consumer working around tech problems since AOL launched, so I will try my best to explain what I can, and understand what anyone here try's to offer.
First off, here are my specs:
Processor  2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory  8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics  Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB
Software  Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50b)
Reason for Boot camp:
I work with Final Cut, Photoshop, Adobe Aftereffects, and a few other heavy duty programs, I'm an Artist and love working with Music and Media.
Some may say that my specs can handle all this, but if it where up to me I would rather have a Tower, but traveling on the road limits me to using the Pro.
On my free time im an avid gamer, At first I was ok with apps, later on I wanted to play some old games like LOTR Battle for Middle Earth, I know my laptop was good enough to play, but I had to get windows so it would be compatible.
I have Parallels 7 from my work, and a copy of Windows 7, and i was able to create a virtual machine to play some PC games.
All was fine until I got into bigger games like ARMA2,
It felt like my laptop was going to die from parallels, so i decided to install Windows on bootcamp because i use it very often. (best of both worlds) 
Because of the  programs i use on OS, i don't want my computer to Run a virtual machine anymore, i feel like its very unhealthy.
I want my OS to run full power flawlessly without the stress of virtual machine, and i want Windows to run full power flawlessly without stressing out OS,
so I am going to use Boot Camp.
How i will go about:
I Have Decided i will attempt to Clone my mac to my External Hard drive.
I have an External 2T Lacie Drive that has lots of space.
Can someone explain to me in light detail how cloning works when you try to reformat your mac off an external Hard drive?
From what i understand you can do it this way.
Also, If i can manage to Clone my mac to my ExHD, will i be able to partition my hard drive for windows, and Re clone my mac back onto one of the partitions?
If this process will work, what steps should i take first?
Clone, then Boot camp?
can i partition my hard drive, add my Mac back onto a partition, then add Windows CD at a Later time? (i dont have the CD on me atm)
i apologize for the length of this post. Its very important that I can continue to access everything on my laptop, i wont be able to have my installation CDs until this October.
Thank you.     

Answer 1

you are fine.
Upgrades from 10.6 to Lion with existing XP or Vista present was/is/can be an issue.
Lion 10.7.0 and Boot Camp 4.0.0 were not working (why? oh, "never use dot zero?)
Lion adds Recovery Partition.
CCC now can clone that partition as well as your HFS volumes.
Lack of contiguous free (unfragmented) storage, with no "locked" files or that fragment the free space.
Shrinking the HFS volume and then stretch it back out to consolidate to get around the free space issue.
Not realizing just how large to make Windows volume (double best estimate rule) or aim for 60GB.
XP only needed 10-16GB or 32GB at top usually. Microsoft and Apple have this "16GB for 32-bit Windows 7" is the OS size, not the size of the partition needed to function (20GB for the base OS for 64-bit).
Add in page, hibernation, temp, cache, and that 10GB just for 'shuffle" files around during updates.
SSDs need space to allow for good background garbage collection and TRIM (a month's worth of writes is a good rule there).
Not documented: you need to get the audio driver on your own along with current graphic driver after you install the OS and Apple drivers.
"Boot Camp" is overused, misused, treated as if people are running BC instead of just running Winidows natively, with all that entails.
Apple Software Update for Windows will update everything except Boot Camp drivers, whereas it could update itself like it has in the past, and could have been the avenue for getting all the drivers into Windows itself.