Linux cannot make a drive bootable, it is your BIOS that does that. You will have to fiddle around with your BIOS settings.
Actually, that isn't quite correct - you do need a
Boot sector, if you want to boot something directly from the drive (in Linux and Windows since 2000 I think) that would normally be: load a bootloader).
This page contains something about making a partition
theoretically bootable, but then you'll have to install a bootloader (like syslinux, grub or lilo) on there too. There's a quite detailed article about the whole process
here.
Greetings,
Nepomuk