Troubles booting eMac from external HDD over firewire

I have an MBP that had to be taken into the shop recently and will unfortunately be there for a week or more. Before I took it, however, I used SuperDuper to do a full backup to a partition on an external HDD (a WD "My Book Pro" 500GB drive with two partitions -- one for full backups and one for extra storage). For the time being, I have an eMac (PPC G4 700Mhz w/OS X 10.4.11) that I was hoping to use to boot from the FW drive.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it fly. I have the drive connected via FW and when I hold down option at boot it only shows the internal drive (I've also waited a few minutes and tried numerous refreshes -- no dice). When I look at Startup Disk in Systems Preferences it does show the FW drive as an available boot device. When I select it and reboot, however, I get a the system folder question mark icon for about two seconds and then the eMac boots from the internal.
I know the backup is fine because I was able to boot over FW from the MBP. The backed up data is system 10.4.11 as well.
Any thoughts?

Hey Dema,
Well the builds for Intel vs PPC Macs are very different. However this can be done as here:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006061610374449
and they talk about the earlier method using two partitions. They figured a way to do it without the partitioning.
Richard
Message was edited by: spudnuty

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