Booting MBP from SATA external drive/hard disk

I have an external SATA HD 120GB portioned in to 4 partitions. It is in an ICY BOX SATA house. Connected direct to the MBP via an USB cable. No external power supply.
I have cloned the OS from the MBP to one partition on the external disk (using SuperDuper!).
I can see the external device in the System preference window ‘Start-up Disk’ I can select it, but it refuses to start up from it. When I do a restart it starts up from my internal HD.
If I hold down the Alt key at start-up I do not see the external HD.
I also have an other non SATA disks connected via FireWire with a cloned version of my OS and here I have no problems.
Any suggestions as to how to be able to boot form the external SATA disk?
Thnaks

In Disk Utility/Partition/Options we can read:
- GUID Partition Table (GPT) "to use the disk to start up an Intel-based Mac".
- Apple partition Map (APM) "to use the disk to start up a PowerPC-based Mac or to use the disk as non startup disk with any Mac".
At http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html we have very important secrets of the GPT:
- Any Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and later can mount GPT-partitioned disks.
_ Intel Macs can boot from GPT. By default, the internal hard disk is formatted as GPT.
- While Intel Macs can boot from GPT and APM, Apple only supports booting Mac OS X on these machines from GPT. Apple's GUI tools, like the Installer, will prevent you installing Mac OS X for an Intel-based Mac on non-GPT disks.
Many posts In this forum telling ius that it is mandatory to format disks GUID partitioned to boot MBP.
But, in other forums there are some opinions about APM too:
. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006061610374449
. http://www.macfixitforums.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38 "How to make a triple-boot service drive"
. http://www.micromat.com/index.php?option=com_simpleboard&Itemid=42&func=view&cat id=7&id=786
We are discuss the boot capability of external drives and I wish someone can clarify this question to isolate software (include cloning software) or hardware problems.
MacBook Pro 2 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

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