Can't install OS X onto external firewire

Hello all,
I have a strange issue going on and apple care won't support it because I am booting an external drive. I have an older ibook and a macbook pro. I have an external drive that has one partition with OS X on it, and another partition for backing up disk images to. I boot up into the OS X on the external drive to make image backups of my Mac HD onto the other partition of the external using superduper.
Here's my problem, I can do this perfectly with the ibook....but not the macbook. When I boot the computer holding down the option key it doesn't even show the external drive as an option as a startup disk. I though maybe because I installed the OS X on the drive using the ibook and an older retail Tiger disk, I should try to reinstall using the macbook's restore disk and do it through the macbook...just in case. When I startup with the install disk, it says that I cannot install OS X onto the external drive.
I am using a lacie drive here. I have created bootable backups using superduper on this drive, and successfully booted the drive many times in the past. So I know it is not that the drive is not bootable, but I don't know what else could be causing this.
Any ideas on this one? I'm getting frustrated, and I'm sure I am just overlooking something here!
From a friend in need!
sterlingfive

Welcome to the Forums!
What you are overlooking is that PPC-based computers like your iBook and Intel-based computers like the MacBook Pro require different partition schemes for their boot disks. Your external HDD is formatted properly for PPC booting (Apple Partition Scheme), and thus your Intel Mac, which requires a GUID partition to boot from, cannot boot from it.
There is a way to configure your HDD to boot both types of Macs, but it's a bit complex. Instructions can be found here:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060721104222189
Hope this helps...

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