How can I use an external HD to boot from in Snow Leopard? Recently my OS X Snow Leopard has been taking a really long time to boot up. Suspecting that something might be wrong with the HD I did a disk verification using the Disk Utility. It showed me an error message stating that i need to repair the disk using the disk utility from the installation disk.

However, my CD ROM does not function properly and I am unable to boot from the installation disk.

Is there any way I can use an external HD to boot from?
Any solutions that you could suggest?

[EDIT]
Unfortunately I dont have access to another mac
You will need a USB drive (8GB) and access to another Mac or a functioning CD ROM drive. You can use any external drive instead of a USB drive, but be aware that you'll have to format the drive and you'll loose any content on it.

The procedure to make the external HD bootable is explained at Upgrading to Snow Leopard without optical drive