Ibook g4 won't boot or find firewire for booting

thank you for reading this and offering assistance.
i have a g4 (screen is 14.1 -- purchased new 2 years ago, i am trying to boot the computer from a firewire hard drive. the backup image appears to work. an image created for my other mac -- intel imac, and it works great for it.
i have a western digital 500gig mybook firewire/usb/esata drive. i partitioned the drive into 3 partitions: imac image, ibook image, and data backup. i have used several programs (including copy clone) to create an image and the image appears to work. but when i try to boot from the disk (holding options key) only the regular built in drive shows up.
both computers are running 10.4.11
help.... thank you

My 2004 iBook has a 120 GB Western Digital drive which I recently installed, replacing the original 30 GB Toshiba drive. It also has the 800 MHz processor and 640 MB of memory.
The iBook is running 10.4.11. The MBP is running 10.5.2.
The bootable clone is on a 250 GB Western Digital drive (WD2500BEVE) in a firewire enclosure, and this drive is divided into two equal partitions using the Apple Partition scheme. The iBook clone boots the iBook with no trouble.
My other external drive, which contains the clone for the MBP, is a 320 GB Western Digital drive (WD3200BEVT) in a firewire enclosure, and this drive is divided into three equal partitions using the GUID partition scheme. I installed a clone of the iBook on one of these partitions, and the iBook would NOT boot from the clone.
One question here, since you mentioned images earlier on. Are you creating a bootable clone using Carbon Copy, or are you creating a Read/Write "Sparse" Image? I am not at all familiar with Carbon Copy since I use a registered copy of Super Duper, but the Super Duper manual does discuss creating Sparse Images instead of bootable clones. Since a Sparse Image is an image rather than a bootable drive, it cannot be used to start up your Mac. If Carbon Copy has the same option, you may be creating a non-bootable image rather than a clone.
Also, be sure and do the PRAM or NVRAM reset suggested by spudnuty, in case that is a contributing factor.
Good luck!

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    For some time, when I access my flash player settings thru my web browser, it freezes. I cannot advance to any tabs or select anything, nor even close the settings window. The settings that were saved from when it worked are no longer saved so when i

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