How do you put a back up system on a firewire external drive?

I was taking my new MacBook in to the genius bar to diagnose a possible defective USB port. I wanted to clone the entire hard drive to an external drive for a backup. To do that, one must start up from the external drive. I tried to install a startup system from the install disks that came with the computer. This was not permitted. I assume they can only be used for a restore. I tried to clone the drive directly but the resulting system would not boot. I used my Tiger install disks from my previous system on a PowerPC iMac to install to the hard drive but there was no way to update this system to an Intel version. It does not seem reasonable that I should have to buy new copy of Tiger(Intel) to do this type of backup. There must be a way.

"... I wanted to put a simple clean install on an external drive before cloning. There seems to be no way to do that without purchasing a new copy of the OS."
That is correct. At any rate, a "clean install" would not be a backup of your "existing" system and therefore, would not serve any real useful function.
"It was my understanding that a correct clone could only be made after booting from an external source. Otherwise the active system files would not be copied correctly."
Completely untrue. Cloning does not involve any files loaded into RAM. It just copies files from the HD. Cloning your "active" system will give you a true backup as it will preserve all of your settings, updates, apps and any other mods you have made.
Follow the instructions posted above by "cornelius" and you will have a bootable backup that is an exact copy of your system as it currently exists. Of course, any changes to the system made after cloning will not be saved on the backup copy. For this reason, I re-clone my system every time I add, remove or change anything of importance (this is in addition to my data backups which are done separately).

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