debian – Virtualbox content in a external drive

I bought a very old Toshiba laptop for hobby and I wanted to install Debian woody on it. Doing it physically is quiet cumbersome since you have to make a special bootable floppy disk so it would accept to boot up from CD drive, and then burn a compact disk (that’s not the hard part).

I want to know if I can load the Debian Linux (woody) operating system I configured in VirtualBox onto the laptop’s hard drive (I can connect it), or not.

Tl;Dr : Can I load the operating system content I made in Virtual box into an external hard drive and boot from it?