restoring to a reformatted hard drive
I have two partitions on my hard drive and would like to reformat the disk with a single partition since I really don't need two any more. The boot drive is running 10.9.5. As I (think) I understand it, the way to go is to boot with an external drive, reformat the disk and restore from Time Machine. However, I'm unable to boot from a recovery disk (booting and holding cmd-R just gives me my normal login screen); holding option as I boot likewise only offers 10.9.5. I had understood that the disk that holds the Time Machine backup (it's an external Iomega drive) should have a bootable system, but apparently not - startup disk preference pane only offers my 10.9.5 partion
I'm assuming I can create a bootable system on a USB drive (for example: and I would be grateful for tips on how to do this), but will this have a version of Time Machine that I can then use to restore an exact copy of my backup once I've reformated my hard drive?
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)