Can a slave drive be made bootable ?

I was reading the post about installing xp without a floppy or cd and I got curious if it can be done
The post was never really answered
It's just connecting to another computer that has a floppy or cd so that's not much of a challenge
I am not even sure why go into the process of installing ms-dos if a cd is available. Just boot from the cd and install xp on the hard drive connected
I was wondering if it would be possible to make a slave drive bootable one from a dual boot xp system for example