How to boot always from a firewire disk?

Hello,
I hope someone can help me on this.
My HD is almost dead and it's making a lot of noise. I have managed to create a boot disk
on an external disk connected through Firewire.
What shall I do now to have the HD definetly unmounted and have the boot always from the firewire disk?
Thanks in advance
Tom

I've had a similar problem with an external drive that was USB powered.
In my case, the system was looking for a boot device before the drive was ready.
I had a friend that was good with OpenFirmware add a delay before booting to give the drive time to become ready. Added 5 seconds to the boot process, but it works!
Like cldjr said, hold the Option key (⌘) when powering up, if the drive shows up there, I'd guess it's the problem I described...
Anyone good with OpenFirmware??

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I had assumed that if I switched off the powerbook & then re-started it, (with the Lacie disk connected... Firewire 800) that I would then be given the option of booting from either the Powerbook hard drive OR the Lacie hard drive. Not so.... Powerbook booted up as per normal, having 'recognised' the Lacie disk & placed it's icons on my desktop.
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regards
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I have recently purchased a a WD FreeAgent 1Tb external disk, to use as a Time Machine drive.
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