Booting from a different partition of an external hard drive

Any chance anyone could offer some advice for my asthmatic iBook G4?
The internal hard drive has given up the ghost.
I have re-installed Mac OS X 10.3.3 on a NEW external portable drive which I have partitioned. I have copied the contents of the farked internal HD - Mac OS X 10.3.9 to partition 2 of the external drive. Partition 1 currently has the re-installed recovery version OS X 10.3.3 on it and is now the selected drive and volume to boot from. However I now want to change the boot volume from partition 1 to partition 2 which includes all the OS updates to 10.3.9 plus all my user preferences, etc.
I have tried everything but to no avail. Renaming the partitions by reversing the numbering has no difference. The Start Menu just recognises the same parition even though it is renamed as other partition and vice versa. The Start Up file in System Preferences won't recognise partition 2, only partition 1 and the farked internal HD. I have tried restarting the iBook while pressing the Option key with and without the recovery disc #1 in the CD drive. No difference.
I am thinking now that the Start Up menu is able to only recognise 2 drives - the internal and an external one which is connected by Firewire 400 port of which there is only one. Or only distinct drives. It can't recognise separate partitioned drives which would be pretty pi$$ poor. There are two other USB ports but I guess these are for other peripherals.
So how can I get my iBook G4 to boot from Partition 2 of the NEW external drive?
Just to re-iterate my iBook boots fine from the NEW portable hard drive partition 1, but this partition only has the OS X system as per the recovery disc.
My Mac is starting to really test my patience.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Message was edited by: AlAlexander
Message was edited by: AlAlexander
Message was edited by: AlAlexander

Limnos wrote:
*In order to produce a bootable copy of the system on another volume you have to copy it using a cloning utility. Plain drag and drop will not work with OSX*.
[CarbonCopy Cloner|http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html] (donationware)
[SuperDuper|http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html] (shareware)
[IBackup|http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/index.html] (free)
The Restore function of Disk Utility included in OS X. [Kappy's directions|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8799711#8799711]
[Tri-Backup (commercial)|http://www.tri-edre.com/english/tribackup.html] (payware)
[Silverkeeper|http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper> (free) - version 2 has some issues (references: [here|http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/backup/index.html#d12jan2009], and [here|http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/backup/index.html#d13jan2009]) and it is recommended Tiger users stick with 1.1.4.
[Kappy's Backup Software Recommendations|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9065665#9065665]
[Overview of Mac OS X Backup Programs|http://8help.osu.edu/1247.html]
Drag and drop is what I did so I will have to use CarbonCopy Cloner. Thanks for the tip. I shall report back shortly.

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Booting from a different partition of an external hard drive

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