Can't confirm boot from WD usb on Intel Mac

[ChrisP]

from an earlier discussion, Dave said:

>>
No, because you can't boot from a USB drive. And, while you *can* partition with two file systems, you need to use "GUID" (for Intel Macs) or "APM" (for Power PC Macs) as the partition scheme if you want to be able to start up from the drive. Windows can't recognize either, and needs "Master Boot Record"... which can't start up a Mac.
<<

Hi,

I'm a new Mac user and new SuperDuper user, so please bear with me.

I bought a new Intel-based MacBookPro and have a WD 500G usb 2.0 external drive. I partitioned the WD into one 320G NTFS and one 180G MacOS Journaled. I can use SD to clone to the Mac partition (erase/copy) and I can do SmartCopy as well. The copy processes also seem to execute all of the post-copy actions without error: set target bootable, restart from backup.

But, I can't get my external drive to show on the boot screen when holding the Option key, it only shows "Macintosh HD". Even when I do a SmartCopy and check the "Restart from backup" option, when it restarts I check the "About this Mac" and it reads "Macintosh HD". The backup shows in the StartUp Disk tab and seems to be viable. I can run programs from it as a mounted drive, but I just can't confirm that it will actually boot.

Since I want to use the external drive as a disaster recovery, this it troubling. The only thing I could find when searching the archives was that I didn't use the GUID option when making the MacOS partition. Will this do the trick? Is there something else I'm missing?

Thanks,
Chris