Weird story (feel free to skip it but I was wondering if this happened to anyone else) and a few questions:
I have an Iomega 160GB firewire drive which is partitioned into 3 (Apple Partition Map). I didn't realize that the Apple partition wasn't supposed to work with an intel mac. The strange thing is that my Macbook Clone IS bootable (I tried it once when I first did it and the Sys prefs still recognize the external boot as a startup- used superduper). I used one of the empty partitions to revive my G3 iBook with the dead hard drive by installing 10.3.9 from a startup disk. Worked for a day, restarted just fine 5 or 6 times. Then disaster, I got a spinny beachball and so I restarted the machine. This time the "Dead" hard drive in the G3 tried to start up instead of the FW drive and it shut itself down. Tried restarting with Opt held down but it didn't poll the FW HDD partition with 10.3.9 as a valid disk anymore. I put in the Panther startup disk and ran disk utility and I couldn't mount the partition. That partition was dead. Said there were errors and needed repair but it wouldn't let me repair it because of another set of errors. Messed up. Had to erase it from my Macbook.

My Questions: How is it possible that my Macbook can boot off the drive if the partition scheme is Apple Parition Map and not GUID? It it possible just not recommended? Is my backup going to have stability issues?

Is there a way to (non invasively) disable the internal HD of my iBook so I can set the Startup Disk to always be the FW drive, even if it tries to boot up again on startup? I'm worried the internal disk took priority on startup and messed things up.

I'm going to try installing 10.3.9 again (glutton for punishment that I am). Any suggestions or things to watch out for? Any reasons why it might have worked at first and then suddenly stopped? I might try the process posted at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006061610374449 (but I'm not looking forward to backing up and partitioning my 100GB scratch drive).

Thanks in advance to whoever is interested...

Funny thing is, the intel boot disc is APM, not GUID. So you CAN run an APM drive on an Intel Mac, but it's still intel architecture OSX, so it won't run on a PPC machine properly. It partially works because many pieces of OSX are universal, not intel-only, but not all of it (like leopard will be).

There are tutorials on how to actually build a proper universal install of Tiger, but I don't have the links off hand.

Does this mean that the clone is somehow incomplete? Or does it just mean as long as I keep the Intel/PPC on thier own partitions doing their own thing it'll work? (BTW, I reinstalled 10.3.9 on my iBook/FW-HDD and it seems to work fine... I can even read things off the intel boot and use the scratch drive). I've seen that universal install of Tiger disk somewhere. Might see if I can do it with what I have...