Booting my imac from an external firewire drive suddenly stopped working. Disk still mounts but it will not boot the machine!

I took my MacBook Pro in for repairs and erased the drive for safety AFTER having copied the entire contents to an external firewire 800 drive using SuperDuper!
The copy process made the disk bootable and I was able to boot up my iMac and run it just as if I were working on my MacBook Pro. After a couple of times working this way, the iMac stopped booting from my drive.
The drive shows up when starting up by pressing the option key but then, after a long time, the iMac shows a circle/slash symbol as if it can't find the system files.
If I restart without pressing the option key, the disk mounts on the desktop and I can use it as an external drive just fine!  I tried selecting it in System Preferences as the startup disk, but the same thing happens, blank grey screen with the circle/slash.
Since this happened with a Seagat drive - a brand that has failed me in the past many times - I thought it was a disk problem. I had backed up my MacBook pro contents to another Toshiba drive, and booted from there perfectly well for a couple of times...
Until the same thing happened! Thank God I didn't trash the Seagate although it makes very faint clicking noises that will keep me far away from using it again anyway... but that's another story!
iMac runs 10.5.8, the boot disk (and my MacBook) runs on 10.6.8 if that makes any difference... And now I'm scared that when I copy back to my MacBook Pro it might not boot up at all!!!
What gives???
- MerlinCreative

You need to reinstall Snow Leopard onto the external drive:
Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive
Do the following:
1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
2. Reinstall Snow Leopard
If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer.  Proceed with reinstalling OS X.  Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files.  After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.
Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.

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