Yet another "won't boot from a certain disk" issue

Question

My Sawtooth G4 just got a new second drive, which seems to work fine. At first it wouldn't boot OS 9 (there are multiple partitions on it) but after some messing with the OS 9 install disk and changing the Startup Disk in the control panel I got that sorted out. The real problem is with OS X. I'm running 10.3.9 on my primary HD and I wanted another OS X system on the new HD so I CCC'd my first disk to the new HD's first partition (which worked fine on the old drive's second partition, now erased) but the Mac won't boot from it. It showed up under the boot options menu (hold option down) but simply wouldn't boot from it no matter what. Finally, I erased the partition and installed OS 10.3 then upgraded it to 10.3.9 (still won't boot from it) but the problem continues. I get the spinning wheel followed by the circle with the bar through it.
It looks to me like there are tons of possible causes for this after reading through several similar threads here. Could somebody tell me what the most logical approach is to fixing this? Or maybe there's some stupid obvious thing I forgot?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Haven't you ever had a system crash or something that messed up your startup disk or some portion of the OS? And what if your prefs or anything custom has been affected? If you only have one startup drive and it gets hosed you are really in a world of hurt, as then it's up to recovery methods to salvage things. And if you don't have unlimited time to sort all this out? It seems obvious why I would want two startup disks - I've used this system for fifteen years and it just works, thats all. Under OS 9 everything was a lot simpler - you just copied the files to another disk and if they were there, you got a boot disk; everything is a lot more complex in X and I don't really understand it even now.
Then there's the issue of why the other startup disk, while recognized as such, won't boot. That's a puzzle to me. I can't imagine how the Carbon Copy Cloned disk wouldn't work for this - that's what I did before and it worked fine.
The new drive is a SATA drive with an OWC card, but since the partitions with OS9 boots work fine I don't know what to think. (I have to have OS 9 because I still use Vision for my sequencing and audio recording, and because 9 crashes more often than X I always have at least two boot disks of my main system - just in case.)
Thanks.