Cannot Boot from external drive..

[iambeetle]

I do backup regularly and few days ago, my internal hard drive failed.
So I got the hard drive replaced and installed a new operation system.

I tried to boot from my backup disk, however, I couldn't see it on my Startup disk option. I thought it was the problem with USB drive. So I put my backup disk into a Firewire enclosure.

This time, I can see the backup disk from the Startup disk option. I choosed to start up from the disk. However, my Powerbook G4 got frozen with a grey screen without a apple logo on it.

Any guess what is wrong with it?

Thanks a lot!!

[dnanian]

That seems weird -- no, I don't know what might be wrong. But, if you have a clean drive, during the first boot, please indicate that you want to copy files from an old Mac. Then, point that to the backup on the FireWire drive, and it should migrate your applications and data.

[iambeetle]

I have solve the problem with a little help from my other mac...

This is what I did...
I connect my powerbook G4 to a macbook by firewire, the powerbook is set to taget disk mode. And connect my macbook to the external hard drive.
Then I use superduper to copy all files from the external ahrd drive to my powerbook. It works fine.

But I am wondering what is wrong with my external hard drive?
It's not bootable as mentioned but if I clone the drive to my powerbook, it's fully functional.... Is it the problem of the formating of my external drive?

Is there any specific requirement for a external bootable drive?

If I can solve this, maybe restoring my data will be easier... thanks a lot!

[dnanian]

It's not so much the formatted (it's Mac OS Extended if you were able to write directly to it), but possible the partitioning (which, for a Power PC Mac, needs to be "Apple Partition Map"). It's also possible that your drive isn't boot compatible with Mac OS X...

[rdmeyers]

Is there a list of OS X "boot compatible" drives somewhere? I want to buy a LaCie d2 quadra to use as a boot drive. Does anyone know if this is compatible?

[dnanian]

You know, there really isn't. The Quadra should work, though, although it might not boot as eSATA.