Cannot Boot MacBook from an external seagate hd

I'm trying to boot osx from an external seagate hd on a recent MacBook via it's USB port. The external hd has a GUID max osx journaled partition and has osx installed on it.
I can use either option restart or system pref / startup disk to select the external hd as the startup disk. The external seagate hd will happily act as startup disk for my iMac via it's USB port. But the MacBook stubbornly resists. It recognizes the external hd as bootable, but simply attempts to reboot and then shows a greyed advisory dialog: please hold the power button to turn off this MacBook. The MacBook turns off. I turn it back on and it goes through the same loop of trying to reboot of the external hd, turn off dialog etc... Eventually I just unplug the external hd once it is powered down and turn the MacBook back on so that it can reboot of it's internal hd.
So my question is: why won't this MacBook boot from a working osx installed GUID partitioned external hd ?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Bill..

Kappy,
Thanks for the prompt reply. Both the MacBook ( purchased 2 months ago brand new from Apple) and iMac (the iMac boots of the external Seagate hd) are running OSX 10.6.8 while the Seagate is by definition running the Snow Leopard Osx 10.6 install (Apple supplied Osx DVDs ).
I could try and update the externl hd OSX version to 10.6.8 on the iMac.
I'll this idea and get back to you.
Thanks again,
Bill...

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