Is it possible to boot a G4 (pci graphics) from an external firewire drive?

I have a Lacie 250 gig bootable external firewire drive which is recognized on my Power PC G4 400 but I cannot get it to boot from this drive. The procedure works fine on my ibook... I looked into a possible firmware update but the apple site says no update is necessary for the G4 400/pci graphics...
Any suggestions?

There sure are some radically contradictory posts here! (This isn't typical, at least in this section of the Discussions, RMx2.)
Can anyone who has posted here (or might join in here) actually boot from a hard drive connected via USB? I just tested this with OS X and I can't. For some time now, the Discussions have been riddled with posts, whether 100% accurate or inaccurate, that Macs don't boot from USB drives, despite the seemingly conflicting info in the article that Don kindly referenced. (John Huber: Don't eat your words just yet, John!)
Here's my personal experience, for what it's worth... I have a rev.2 B&W G3 which recognizes, reads, and writes to drives via USB, but refuses to boot from them (I tested with OS X 10.3 and 10.4). I also have a QS 2002 G4 that yields the same results. The QS G4 will, however, boot from these drives via FW. I used a WiebeTech ComboDock for testing this with both USB and FW. I tested with two different hard drives, both of which are known to have stable, working versions of OS X on them.
My G3 running OS X 10.3.9 sees the USB-connected drives in the Startup Disk Preference Pane, but when I click to Restart after selecting the USB system folder there, I get a beachball (haven't seen that in awhile...) and have to Force Quit System Preferences. Console tells me that that it could not get open firmware information or set open firmware information, and that it can't touch or set System/Library/CoreServices/BootX, returning Error 1 running bless.
On the QS running Tiger, the USB OSs don't even appear in the Startup Disk Pane of Sys Prefs. I can see the USB drive(s) using the Startup Manager, but selecting them and restarting results in a hung startup to a spinning cog with a prohibitory sign on the screen...
I haven't tried playing around with open firmware NVRAM settings (and don't intend to, except perhaps for trying an NVRAM reset), nor have I attempted to boot to OS 9, reset the startup disk there, and attempt the boot again to the USB device in OS X and in OS 9, which I may try later on when I have a bit of time...
Gary
Message was edited by: Majordadusma

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