External firewire drive fails to boot OS X after restart

I have a G4 Cube that exhibits a perplexing boot issue on an external firewire drive. The external drive is a clone of the Cube's internal dual boot, two partition drive made with an identical 120 GB Seagate. The internal drive boots without incident into either OS X or OS 9 - each in it's own partition.
The problem comes when I select the external drive's OS X partition in Startup Disk and restart - the external drive's activity LED shows an initial attempt to boot but then hesitates and boots to the internal OS X partition repeatedly.
As a workaround, I am able to select and boot to the OS 9 partition, either internally or externally, launch the StartUp Disk control panel, select the external OS X partition and reboot successfully into that partition. But upon a restart, it fails to boot into the external OS X partition repeating the aforementioned behavior i.e. it boots to the internal OS X partition.
Using Option-Restart shows the the two partitions on the external drive and the two partitions on the internal drive normally but will only successfully process selecting either of the two OS 9 partitions or the internal OS X partition, again failing to process a selection to the external OS X partition.
Interestingly, this same external firewire drive will repeatedly boot to it's OS X partition without incident using either of two iBook G4s.
I'm stumped!

Hi, LEOinDC -
How old is the internal battery in that Cube? Many machines exhibit boot anomalies if that battery is too weak or dead.
Those batteries have an expected life of about 4 to 5 years under best-case usage; if the machine is unplugged regularly or for an extended period, the battery is consumed much faster. Even if the machine is not unnplugged the battery will eventually die, and there will be no symptoms such as loss of date or time since the trickle power drawn when the machine is shut down (but still plugged in) will maintain those.
Also, is the external firewire drive self-powered? If not, try that.
Sometimes when using Startup Manager (which is what booting with Option held down invokes), all available bootable volumes aren't picked up before it displays what it has found. The solution for that is to click the circular arrow button in Startup Manager - this is an instruction to rescan the buses.

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Thanks for the reply. The drive is mounted properly when I follow your procedure, same as it was when I powered down the drive. Your procedure differs from what I described in that the drive is powered down before the cable is unplugged. Maybe that's the safest approach. But I was looking for a way to avoid powering down the external drive since that involves unplugging the power connector (i.e., there is no power switch). Any way to avoid the power down?

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External Firewire Drives Don't Mount.... i need a guru.

Warning!!!!!
i'm going to ramble....
2 much sake .. heh heh
i just got a brand butt spanking new iBook G4 14" 1.42 GHz
Tiger pre-installed.
I ran Software Update. As you can tell by my info, i'm at 10.4.2 now.
In a minute i'll tell ya how i got BACK to 10.4.2 from 10.4.5
When i got my iBook I didn't plug my external firewire drives in until (about 2 days) after my update. So when i did get around to building my iTunes library, well, no luck.
My firewire drives would and do NOT mount!
By the way these particular peripherals are Western Digital firewire
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?p_faqid=694&pcreated=1036793224
and AcomData Combo USB 2.0/Firewire
http://www.acomdata.com/hdp/fs.html
drives.
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The AcomData drive mounts with USB but not with firewire. The thing that
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i swear i did all this with my peripherals unplugged.
i caught wind that though these companies may not provide updates for Mac, if i were to find out the companies that make the "chipsets?" within these drives that i might have luck.
i can't figure out what kind of "chipsets" (Oxford?) are in these drives or what to do if i knew anyway!
exhale
i still believe i have the best machine on the planet right now but .......
i need a guru.
help.
much obliged,
Clive
 G4 iBooks. iMac DV (graphite). gen 2,3,5 iPods Linux on the Pod too! Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Hi, Clive.
Here is some general troubleshooting advice that may help:
(1) Review the AppleCare Knowledge Base document "What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire device".
(2) If this problem occurred after installing a recent Mac OS X Update, and you are also unable to mount CDs, DVDs, or disk images perform the steps in this Mac OS X Hints article.
(3) The following additional steps will often help resolve problems with FireWire devices, particularly hard drives:(a) Power-on the FireWire drive before starting up (booting) your Mac.
(b) Reset PRAM and NVRAM.
(c) Reset the PMU or SMU: In the case of your iBook, I believe the article you want is "Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)." You can also check the manual that came with your new iBook.
(d) Try a different FireWire port. James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech, has published FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices, a white paper providing backgroud information and technical analysis concerning the causes of failure for FireWire ports. This may provide additional diagnostic information.Note that some of the information above is from the "FireWire Problems" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X.
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Booting os x from *partitioned* external firewire drive?

Hi all,
my internal hard disk (on a 12" powerbook G4 867 mhz running osx tiger 10.4.10) has started acting weird (many people are reporting failing hard drives, and I'm assuming mine is failing too), so I'm preparing for replacing it with a new hard drive.
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PROBLEM: I can't boot OS X using my clone on the external drive.
I'VE TRIED:
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My external drive is partitioned into three partitions of different formats:
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Hi Philip,
My problem has been fixed, & I imagine it's the same for you...:
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Apple Partition Map (to create a bootable drive for a Power PC Mac)
Master Boot Record (to create a bootable PC drive)
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Jason

Cannot boot my mini from CD/DVD or external firewire drive

The problem I face is simple: I cannot boot my mini from CD/DVD or external firewire drive.
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I tried disconnecting the mini from everything and waiting one night.
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Anyone has an idea whether it is software or hardware ?
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JC
Intel mini early 2006 Mac OS X (10.4.10) 2gb RAM, core duo

Hi DaddyPaycheck,
Thanks for your message. Indeed, I failed to mention the problem from the Startup Disk Preference point of view.
Bootable CD and/or external disks also never appear in Startup Disk Prefs.
It indeed sounds like time for a backup (I did that) and a HD erase and reinstall of OSX. But since the CD does not want to boot, I tried installing from another Mac with my mini booted as FireWire drive. And that failed, probably because the master mini I used was a G4 one...
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JC

Is it possible to boot a G4 (pci graphics) from an external firewire drive?

I have a Lacie 250 gig bootable external firewire drive which is recognized on my Power PC G4 400 but I cannot get it to boot from this drive. The procedure works fine on my ibook... I looked into a possible firmware update but the apple site says no update is necessary for the G4 400/pci graphics...
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There sure are some radically contradictory posts here! (This isn't typical, at least in this section of the Discussions, RMx2.)
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Message was edited by: Majordadusma

How do I back up my Boot Camp partition to external firewire drive?

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Any suggestions on how to backup the Boot Camp partition will be appreciated. I'm mainly interested in preserving all programs and data. Ideally, a clone could be created that could be restored back to the original partition in bootable form, but from studying this and other forums, it dosn't seem to be easy to do this for a FAT32-formatted volume.

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Can WinXP be loaded and booted from external firewire drive?

The subject line probably says it all but:
Does the recent firmware upgrade and/or BootCamp allow you to install WinXP on an external Firewire drive rather than partitioning the iMac Core Duo's internal drive?
Mike
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The other problem is XP itself doesn't support booting from firewire. Even if someone could figure out how to install to an external from bootcamp, you would still have to contend with XP.
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Hi
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<http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html>
<http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html>

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Hello there.
I got a brand new 17" 2g intel iMac and I'm very happy with it.
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External firewire drive fails to boot OS X after restart

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