No shared network access when booted from Firewire

Question

I can't seem to access any volumes on my network when my MacMini is booted from an ext. firewire drive. I've tried to do this from two seperate bootable FW drives and I can't access my NAS or any of the other Macs on my network. This is an issue that I just noticed. I have worked with Macs and PCs across networks for a while but I can't figure this one out for some reason.
I'm running MacMini 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and I'm on 10.5.8. Any insight is appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

UPDATED/SOLVED---I finally figured this problem out. **Note: This whole process began with the desire to expand my original MacMini's 75GB HD space and to avoid potential disaster. I have recently been going through a spate of HD failures and I really wanted to avoid such a calamity with my main system volume. So the goal was to, in effect, replace the MacMini's drive without having to open it up by simply buying a new 1TB drive and dropping it into a FW enclosure with a huge fan. I had hoped that a simple BounceBack recover would do the trick but I quickly found out that it was not to be.
The problem existed on backup copies that were created by my old version (5.1.4) of BounceBack (that I never updated). For whatever reason, that version excludes necessary components for networking when making bootable volumes. Therefore all my external FW drives that were bootable were not truly complete/useable volumes. Here's how I came to that conclusion and how I ultimately solved the problem. 
1. I ended up having to do a reinstall of Leopard. I did this by cloning Leopard install disc to an image file and then restoring that image file to the FW drive. The real purpose of cloning the install disc was to immediately test the veracity of my theory that the problem lay within my BounceBack bootable volumes and not with the FW drives themselves. Sure enough, I found everything to be working perfectly from the newly minted, clean install Leopard FW volume. So then...
2. ...I cloned the MacMini's orginal internal HD. It was the only volume with my most recent system that did NOT have the aforementioned network access problems and it was the volume from which all of the other BounceBack volumes were created.
3. I restored this volume to the FW drive and was rewarded with a brand new, expanded and fully working system volume with all my applications and settings intact.
To be fair, I feel compelled to mention that this is not necessarily an indictment of BounceBack. Again, the copy I was using is several years old and I simply never paid for an update, thinking that the copy I was using was sufficient. I'm willing to bet that the makers of BounceBack solved this problem long ago with one of the many updates since that have been released I first purchased the software. That being said, I'm now using Time Machine for backups of  my system volume while utilizing BounceBack for data on other volumes that don't need to be bootable.