Computer Freezes When Booting From Firewire HDD

I was trying to boot from my firewire drive, so that I could use CCC and restore the internal drive. After using CCC to back up the internal drive, and then getting the computer to boot from the firewire drive, boot-up froze when it got to the blue screen (after the Apple logo). The mouse was functioning, but that was it. Can anyone suggest anything?
The Firewire drive is a WD MyBook Home Edition. I've JUST updated the firmware, but I haven't tried again yet. I've also heard about the GUID option, but I can't remember if I turned that on or not. Also: The disk contains data which can't be moved or deleted, so re-partitioning the drive is out.
If booting doesn't work, can I use CCC to clone a disk image, boot from the Leopard DVD, and restore the internal drive using the cloned image with Disk Utility?

You can't change the partition scheme to GUID without erasing, but [this article|http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071129085410333] in MacFixit contains the following:
"although a PowerPC Mac will not boot from a GUID-partitioned disk (the "native" partitioning for an Intel Mac boot disk), an Intel Mac will boot from an APM-partitioned disk (the "native" partitioning for a PPC boot disk)"
I've seen similar discussions elsewhere as well. My retail Leopard install DVD, bootable on both PPC and Intel Macs, has an APM partition scheme. An Intel Mac will not INSTALL OS X onto an APM-partioned disk, but that is not the same thing. I think that a CCC clone of an Intel-bootable volume onto a disk with an APM partition scheme should still be bootable. I would check further at the [CCC forum|http://forums.bombich.com/viewforum.php?f=12] for confirmation; if so, your problem is elsewhere.
You said the disk contains data which can't be moved - did you create the clone on the same volume that contained this data or did you have a different partition on the drive that you could erase first? If the "data that can't be moved or deleted" on the external drive is not itself backed up somewhere else, it should be.
Would backing up to an disk image, and restoring using the Leopard Install DVD work? This is primarily to defragment my disk, as Boot Camp won't run without contiguous disk space.
I think this should work but is risky because you can't boot the disk-image to test it beforehand to be sure it is OK. And if it is not OK, you won't find out until after the restore has failed on your now-erased internal HD.

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