Backup Not Bootable, Please Help
 

Yesterday I decided to see if I could boot off my SuperDuper cloned external system drive. My setup is as follows:

Computer: PowerPC G5
External Firewire: OWC Mercury Elite-AL FireWire 800/400 + USB2 with 2
Firewire chipset: Oxford 924
Drives:
Hitach Deskstar 500GB SATA drives
Partition Map: Apple Partition Table
Format: MacOS Extended (Journaled)


I've been cloning every night using Smart Copy and everything in the logs looks good to my untrained eye.

When I went to boot from the external drive, OS X recognized it as a system disk and let me choose it both while booting with Option held down and from system preferences: Startup Disk. But the former only begins to boot, gets to the silver screen with Apple logo and then abruptly swaps the apple logo for a "do not" icon (for lack of a better term) think "no smoking" without the cigarette. After a couple of minutes all the fans in the tower come on as if I was in single user mode and I'm forced to hold the power button (for lack of any other ideas) to shutdown the machine so I can boot from the internal system disk. If I choose the external disk from System Preferences when I boot I get a folder icon with a question mark then the system decides to go ahead and boot from the internal drive.

I contacted Apple support last night since I've never tried to boot from an external drive before I wanted to make sure that there weren't any hardware problems that they could help me with, but there wasn't. They reported that the "do not" icon seemed to indicate that the system disk was missing some important files needed at boot time.

I hope this is simply something I'm missing somewhere and not a problem with my hardware.

Can you help me figure out what is keeping me from being able to boot from my superduper clone?

Are you sure the external FireWire drive's partition scheme is Apple Partition Map?

That is what Disk Utility reports, yes. Apple Partition Map.

OK. Please generate a System Profiler report (using the native XML format) and send that to me at the support email address... let me see if I can find any reason for this.