[Birchbarkbob]

hey there, anyone can give assistance, i thought i did it all by the books, but still am not able to boot 10.4.11 from my la cie rugged 500 GB drive.
here the history:
I first got myself super duper, and made a clone off my 60 GB ailing original internal drive in my ibook g4 onto a 160 GB Western Digital drive hooked up temporarily as an external drive in a firewire enclosure.
It all went super duper as advertised.
then i swapped drives, installing the 160 GB Western Digital in the place of the 60 GB original.
All went Super Duper again, booted perfectly, behaves well, happy customer!

That's when i bought the external La Cie Rugged 500GB firewire drive. I wanted to have my mac with me when travelling by bike, yet not have the weight of the thing with me. So i partitioned the drive 4 ways.
one 160gb partition to clone my i books new internal harddrive's content and operating system 10.4.11 to.
Again using super duper, that seemed to all go well.
So now i have been on my trip for a while and everywhere i happen upon a mac i go into Startup disk and my boot partition shows up beside the one of the computer where my La Cie is firewired to.
<then when i click on restart, the Powerbook g4 i'm having access to right shuts down and ends up booted again from it's own 10.4.11
Strange i think,
in finder my La Cie shows up with all 4 partitions, the bootable one aswell and i can access all files and data, but seem unable to boot from it.

Any ideas?
Thank you very much indeed.
robbbert in finland's autonomous åland archipelago, month 5 of the bike trip begun in may

[harryb2448]

PowerPC machines, all G3, G4 and most G5's, generally cannot boot from USB, even USB2 drives, as it is too slow. You need to be backed up on a Firewire external drive, formatted Mac OS Extended (Journalled) and Apple Partition Map, even if using one partition.

La Cie have had Mac problems and earlier this year discontinued Mac support.

[csegeek]

Birchbarkbob

If I'm reading correctly your lacie drive is firewire right ...

I am not sure why its not able to boot to it .. I have been using superduper to clone drives for months and have yet to have it let me down.. but I have been cloning drives with only 1 partition not multiple.. I am wondering if the multiple partitions have messed up the boot structure some way shape or form ... have you tried re-imaging it?

Have you tried System Preferences Startup Disk? telling it to boot to the external?

Tis odd.

[bobtomay]

Mulitple partitions should not matter. Have one of my externals with 3 partitions. Two of them bootable. One partition with 10.5, one with 10.6 and via SuperDuper!

My understanding (as I'm a newb, never owned a PPC) is that PPC required Apple partition map and Intels require a GUID partition table. I have never tried booting my backup on another Mac, but I would guess this would still hold true trying to boot from an external, same as the internal drive.

It could be a matter of your backup just not having the drivers that are required to boot the hardware of the Mac(s) you are now trying.