Wgy isn't a back up on an external fire wire disk bootable?

I just did the first back up on my external firewire HD. When I checked on start up disk on system prefs, I was surprised to see it was not bootable. In case my boot disk goes belly up, how do I use time machine to recover?? I read some of the instructions and it seems you start with the system install disk??

how do I use time machine to recover?
Restart from a Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 disk and use Time Machine on that disk to restore the backup, or install a new OS and migrate from the backup.
(46972)

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