More Firewire booting weirdness
 

I see a lot of threads in here about Firewire booting and thought I'd contribute my experience.

I just downloaded SuperDuper and used it to back up my Powerbook G4. For my external drive I used a Pyro Firewire enclosure from ADS. They claim it works as a boot drive for the Mac.

After the backup completed, I tried rebooting and holding the option key down. Nothing. My Powerbook just hung with a black screen as long as I held down option (and I tried it for, like, 5 minutes). When I let go, it would boot from its internal drive.

So then I tried going to System Preferences and setting it as a boot drive. It let me do that, and when I rebooted, it booted from the Firewire backup.

Then I reset the boot drive back to my internal, and tried rebooting again with the option key down. This time, the screen with the drives came up and I was able to select the Firewire drive and boot from it.

So... maybe you have to select the drive, once, from system preferences before you can boot from it using the option key startup trick?

It certainly shouldn't be necessary, no. They're just blessing the drive as we are, and setting it as the boot target.

It might be a spinup issue where it was delayed, or something similar...