Trouble booting my eMac from an external hard drive

My poor eMac's hard drive finally gave up the ghost the other night and died. My brother attempted to load OS 10.4 onto my external hard drive (Western Digital 320 GB My Book, Studio Edition) so that I could boot the computer up from there for the time being, but soon discovered that while my external can be used as a bootable drive from an Intel Mac, my Power PC was not supported.
Would another external hard drive, such as the LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive, boot from my PPC eMac? I found this note in the product description and want to make sure my computer is capable of this:
+** Bootable on PC or Mac (using FireWire or eSATA). To take advantage of the bootable feature, the LaCie d2 Quadra must be formatted as a bootable drive in accordance with the operating system being used. The computer must include a BIOS or an interface card that supports bootable functionality with an external hard drive.+
If so, I am going to try to ask the Apple Store to exchange my WD external for one that will (it's new, but just past the return date) so I can do this.
Yes, I'm sure it would be easier to just buy a new computer! Thank you for any help you can give!

He's taken the original iMacs apart to access their hds and doesn't relish dealing with that again. On top of that, I can't help but think that spending at least $200 on parts and service on a 6-year-old computer is really that worth it. It'd have a new internal hd, but old and busted processor and everything else. That's why I was aiming for an external set up.
Kitty,
I should have guessed the hd was failing, but didn't think about it.
I run S.M.A.R.T. Reporter on all my machines:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23232
What I need is to know if I'm going to run into this problem with most externals, or is it just the WD that cannot boot from a PPC.
Well like I say I've had two and both boot. I can't say I've ever had a problem with any firewire external.
I see some one else is having the same problem with that drive. Re:
Topic : Trouble accessing Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive
in this same forum.
I realize this would be a sticking point with the store and will totally understand if they tell me "too bad." If the store won't be really nice and help me out, I'll probably just take my lumps and buy a new computer. It was going to happen eventually, I'm just miserly with my money
Well see if you can talk your brother into doing the job. It's a bit harder than the old iMacs (That I can do in about 4 minutes - I even use my power screw driver ). If you email me I can send you instructions.
Too bad you're not near Chicago. I repair and donate Macs to schools in the inner city here.
Richard

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