External hard drive(s) won't boot

Okay, I am at my wits end here. I hope someone may be able to help.
An earlier discussion on this board concluded that the hard drive on my PPC iMac (flower pot) is a goner, so I purchased an OWC Mercury elite AL-Pro 250 GB external drive. I partitioned the drive and set it to the Apple Partition Map as per the instructions, then installed the Leopard OS from the black retail disk to the external drive. After several failed attempts, the OS successfully installed on the drive. The drive showed up on my desktop and when I clicked on the drive it had folders for applications, system etc that make me think it was installed.
BUT when I tried to boot from the external drive, I just got a gray screen. I tried the startup manager and the external drive didn't even show up. I wiped the drive and started over with the same results. So I hooked the drive up to my iBook G4 that runs on PPC, erased the drive, reinstalled the OS and selected the external drive as the startup disk and got the gray screen. So I repeated again and got the same results again. When I tried startup manager on my laptop, I only saw the Mac HD and the drive didn't show up as a possible startup disk, even though it is hooked up and available on my desktop.
So I called OWC tech support. We agreed that the OS was installing but the external drive wasn't booting. The tech guy concluded the drive must be faulty and sent me a replacement.
I eagerly formatted the SECOND hard drive and installed the OS from the install disk on my iMac. First install attempt failed and said the drive must be damaged. I run the repair disk utility and it found a few issues but said they were repaired. So I tried again and the install failed with the same message. So I moved everything over to my laptop and over the course of an hour or so got the OS installed. I then selected the drive as the startup disk (in system preferences), restarted and . . . gray screen. Startup manager shows. . . . no external drive. The drive is available on my desktop but just won't boot.
What am I doing wrong???? I am so frustrated and confused. Please, any help or thoughts?
PS -- interestingly, in the process of installing on the first drive, the internal hard drive on my iMac reappeared from wherever it had vanished to and I erased and partitioned it for the heck of it and the #!&*&% kernel panics that started this whole mess reappeared. Now every single time I start the computer booting from the prodigal internal hard drive I get a kernel panic about 5 seconds after the space scene appears. Agghhh.

BUT when I tried to boot from the external drive, I just got a gray screen. I tried the startup manager and the external drive didn't even show up.
You need to use a firewire connection on all PPCs.
This may be the problem.
My OWC Mercury drive is a little finicky about booting. It needs to be powered down before it will boot. The sequence that works for me.
1) You need to power off everything.
2) poweron external drive.
3) Wait til external drive stablizes ( 10 seconds??? )
4) Holding down the option key then power on iMac. This brings up the startup manager. Click on your external hd. Click on right arrow key.
( once you get it to work, powering off the external drive is probably enough. ) The drive only seems to be bootable right after a poweron. Once you get it to work, you can put all on a power strip. Configure Mac OS X to boot from external drive. Flip powerstrip switch & I thnk all is well.
Robert

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