Can't boot from firewire disk

[Cleve R.]

I'm having a similar problem with a d2 Lacie 250 GIG firewire drive running Panther. However I CAN reboot off the firewire no problem - but if I shut the computer off and restart, it defaults to the internal drive even if I've set the start up disk to default off the firewire.

Then I had an epiphany - I first hit the power button on the firewire drive and let it spin up - then I hit the power button on the computer...and lo...it booted up on the the firewire.

Its not ideal. I'd prefer to just hit the power button on my Mac as sometimes I forget to hit the hard drive button first. But it seems that the firewire drive does not awaken fast enough from the Mac's start up to make the firewire available in time for bootup.