FireWire external drives and bootable DVD's

I have 2 Mac Pro running 10.5.2 with all recent updates:
1) Mac Pro *****UXYL model MacPro3,1 (early 2008)
2) Mac Pro *****00PX model MacPro1,1 ROM de démarrage : MP11.005D.B00
On the second I can mount and boot with a FireWire external drive. I can also use an utility DVD or CD like DiskWarrior.
On the first one, nothing of this is possible : I cannot mount a FireWire drive only an USB drive. I cannot use CD or DVD bootables except of course Install Disks (version 1.1)
I tried to obtain an answer from Apple support without any success.
<post edited by host>

The ROM has been reported in the past to be one element of the issue, but in general Apple has made it abundently clear that you can't install an older operating system on a Mac nor boot from an older operating system than the Mac than came with it in these two articles:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303315
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25517
And as far as I know no one has been able to downgrade the ROM to an older version than it shipped with either to force boot an older operating system.

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    HTH
    -Allen

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