IBook G4 freezes up when using external firewire drive. Any ideas??

I have an external hard drive formatted as Apple Partition Map, with Tiger 10.4.11. I can boot from that drive, but after a while... say, about a minute after it shows everything on the desktop, the iBook freezes.
If I start up from the iBook, I have no problem accessing the files and there are no freezes. I'd like, however, to start up from the external drive during this week while my MacBook Pro is in the shop. That way, documents, etc. will remain up to date, I can use various applications I'm used to, and won't have to go through the hassle of transferring settings for various programs to the iBook (or the programs themselves).
Any ideas what's going on here or how to fix it?

Ronda, we're talking past each other! I wasn't trying to use a cloned drive (MBP or iBook) in any of this!
What I had learned from experience (and from advice here and on the net) was that if you wanted to use an external drive with both an iBook and a MacBook Pro, you needed to format the drive as an Apple Partition Map. And that is true.
Clearly wrongly, I assumed that if I did a fresh install of Tiger using an Apple Partittion Map, it could boot an iBook. Clearly, an Intel-Mac installs something in that scenario that makes the drive only bootable from an Intel-Mac. I had mistakenly thought it was the partition scheme the determined which laptop it could be booted from and used with!
For my future reference--and for any one else who might be in this situation--here's the solution.
1. Format the external hard from the iBook.
2. Then connect it to your MBP or other more recent device, and drag your home folder and needed programs over to the drive.
3. Now, you can boot the external drive using your iBook.
4. Any changes to documents, mail (e.g., Eudora), etc. will register on that external drive.
I wish I had thought of that, or been advised to do that. It would have made short work of reconstructing the MBP's home folder contents on its return--a simple drag and drop operation!

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Warning!!!!!
i'm going to ramble....
2 much sake .. heh heh
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Tiger pre-installed.
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In a minute i'll tell ya how i got BACK to 10.4.2 from 10.4.5
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http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?p_faqid=694&pcreated=1036793224
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exhale
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