OSX 10.4 not booting from an external drive..

[EvertB]

I have installed OSX 10.4 on an external firewire drive.
When started up from the internal drive i can select the external drive as the startup drive, however when it re-starts it does not select the external drive as the startup disk.
Is there any way that I can force the system to boot from the external drive?

E.

 

[DeltaMac]

You can see the bootable partitions by restarting your Mac, and holding the Option key.
You will get a blue screen with 2 arrow icons. Also, you will see any bootable partitions. Give the Mac a couple of minutes for all partitions to show. Your cursor will change back to a normal arrow when the search process is complete. Click on your external drive, and then click on the right-facing arrow to continue with the boot to your external drive. If your external drive does NOT show on that screen, then you either have a bad OS X install, or the external drive is not configured correctly, or is just bad. You can try rebooting to your OS X installer disk, and, at the first installer screen, choose the Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Click on your external drive, and click the Repair Disk button. You can also do the same repair for your INTERNAL drive.
If you haven't booted successfully to the external drive, then you should probably reinstall OS X on that drive.