Booting new iMac from portable drive

Hi,
I have a new 27" iMac on which i wanted to reinstall OSX 10.8. I have a small USB hard drive with 10.8.2 which easily boots a 15" MacBook Pro with retina display. However, when i tried the same drive with the iMac i got a grey screen with a circle and a line through it and nothing more happened.
Anyone have an idea as to what might be the problem?
Thanks

The Late 2012 iMac requires a special OS X 10.8.1 and 10.8.2 that it's only available for this iMac, so it's normal that you can't start from a bootable OS X Mountain Lion created with the build for other Macs. Also, you can only get this version from Internet Recovery.
To reinstall OS X Mountain Lion, press Command and R keys while your Mac is starting and reinstall OS X, so it will download the correct OS X build for the Late 2012 iMac

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What started as a personal project has now evolved into a call for a community collaboration. I think there's a new trick here that should be more available to the ppc using public. Let's create a walkthrough for the public that is complete, concise, and fool-proof.
I have been trying for days to figure out how I can create a bootable drive with what i've got;
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Seagate external USB2 drive, 150 gigs, let's beta this puppy out til we get this
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I have been trying to use my 150gig usb2 external drive to create a bootable drive. The general theory WAS, apparently, that ppc's cannot boot from usb, only firewire - but now intels can boot from either. I've read in many, many posts that USB drives CAN be booted from using a ppc, by either using SuperDuper to do a complete cloning, or booting from Open Firmware and using some scripts.
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I just can't get it right, somehow, although plenty of others posted positive results with the same architecture. Is there a way of getting a good install on the usb drive? Can you give me a good walkthrough of the way to go about booting to it?
Next idea:
I have an old Bondi Blue, with 80gigs in it. Perhaps i can use this as a workaround to overcome the size issue (my internal drive being larger than my available external drive).
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If this is succesful (or first of all possible) then I could mount both the bondi (as an external/network/some kind of drive) and my usb2 hard drive to the PowerMac. With disk utility or SuperDuper, I could restore/clone the bondi to the USB2 drive, and Blam! the USB2 would have a clean install of os 10.4 that i could (maybe?) boot from with Open firmware. Then I could reinstall OS 9 on the bondi (i've been wanting to give it a fresh start anyway).
here's what i've been reading, and it's confusing, contradictory, and without solid answers:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061017084322177
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060301112336384
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-34864.html
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/02/08/intel-macs-can-boot-from-usb-drives/
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/03/07/boot-a-powerpc-mac-from-a-usb2-drive/
Apparently, THIS IS possible. Now I am deadset on figuring this out. With the help of the community, we can create a walkthrough that WORKS and ppc users will be able to create bootable usb2 drives (perhaps even usb1.1 from what i've read).
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What started as a personal project has now evolved into a call for a community collaboration. I think there's a new trick here that should be more available to the ppc using public. Let's create a walkthrough for the public that is complete, concise, and fool-proof.
I have been trying for days to figure out how I can create a bootable drive with what i've got;
PowerMac G5 quad, 500gig drive, 350gigs used, over 200 gigs of unimportant stuff.
Seagate external USB2 drive, 150 gigs, let's beta this puppy out til we get this
bondi blue, 80 gigs, no attachment, no remorse
History:
I have been trying to use my 150gig usb2 external drive to create a bootable drive. The general theory WAS, apparently, that ppc's cannot boot from usb, only firewire - but now intels can boot from either. I've read in many, many posts that USB drives CAN be booted from using a ppc, by either using SuperDuper to do a complete cloning, or booting from Open Firmware and using some scripts.
I can't get either of these to work, and it's probably because i did something wrong or there isn't a solid resource out there on this topic. I think it's because my internal hard drive is bigger than my external, so any cloning i do has to omit folders (movies, pictures, music only) and just isn't a 'complete backup'.
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I just can't get it right, somehow, although plenty of others posted positive results with the same architecture. Is there a way of getting a good install on the usb drive? Can you give me a good walkthrough of the way to go about booting to it?
Next idea:
I have an old Bondi Blue, with 80gigs in it. Perhaps i can use this as a workaround to overcome the size issue (my internal drive being larger than my available external drive).
There's nothing important on the Bondi's hard drive, I just keep it around for OS 9, in case I need that (haven't since I was fourteen years old, though). So I thought, perhaps I can ethernet it to my powermac, reformat the drive and use it as an external drive. Then I bet I could use the install dvd to put 10.4 on it (though it won't run with anything past 10.3.1, just using it as a hard drive i could, right?). So I'd have to boot the bondi blue in some particular fashion; what would that be? As a 'slave drive' or something? Will I be able to boot from this over the ethernet cable?
If this is succesful (or first of all possible) then I could mount both the bondi (as an external/network/some kind of drive) and my usb2 hard drive to the PowerMac. With disk utility or SuperDuper, I could restore/clone the bondi to the USB2 drive, and Blam! the USB2 would have a clean install of os 10.4 that i could (maybe?) boot from with Open firmware. Then I could reinstall OS 9 on the bondi (i've been wanting to give it a fresh start anyway).
here's what i've been reading, and it's confusing, contradictory, and without solid answers:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061017084322177
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060301112336384
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-34864.html
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/02/08/intel-macs-can-boot-from-usb-drives/
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/03/07/boot-a-powerpc-mac-from-a-usb2-drive/
Apparently, THIS IS possible. Now I am deadset on figuring this out. With the help of the community, we can create a walkthrough that WORKS and ppc users will be able to create bootable usb2 drives (perhaps even usb1.1 from what i've read).
G5 quad Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2.5 mghz, 4gigs RAM, 500Gigs storage

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