Hitachi ATA FW drive won´t Boot

[coolcolin]

I recently bought a used Hitachi 2.5" 7200 60GB ATA drive on eBay. I already owned two of these things, they live in "ClearLite" FW boxes that have Oxford Semiconductors FW Bridges.
My intention was to use the 3rd drive in a FW box as a PPC OSX 10.4.11 bootable repair disk. I did all the usual things like writing zeros etc and installed the OS. It refused to boot. I swapped it to one of my ClearLite boxes, same thing. I ran Disk Utility, Disk Warrior and Drive Genius. Some errors were found and repaired but still not bootable. I believe this is a "boot sector" problem but
don´t have the knowledge to go into command line and maybe fix it there. Is there anyone who can provide an idiot proof step by step guide of how to, at least, find out what`s going on and
maybe even fix it? I suppose I could just use it as a Recording disk with DP but I don´t really trust it, even though it appears to function normally other than the booting issue.
thanks in advance
colin

[HCMarkus]

I would never buy a used HD. They are so cheap now, and you are placing (at least a day in) your life's work on the line if you rely on a bad drive. Not an answer, I know, but with 1 TB drives selling for about $100, used drives seem like false economy.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

How are you attempting to boot from the disk? If you are using Startup Disk the Mac might not be polling the external in time to see it. Try holding the OPTION key down during boot. That will prevent startup until all disks are polled. It's a long process sometimes, up to a few minutes. Then use the arrow keys or mouse to select the disk and hit RETURN.

If STARTUP DISK shows the external as an option, then it has a valid boot partition.

[coolcolin]

@ HCMarkus

That´s why my original plan was to use it as a maintenance/repair bootable disk for myself and some of the old studio computers of colleagues.
A way to use a Firewire ATA box I had lying around. Like I said in my original post, I don´t trust it as a recording drive or even a backup disk
for critical (and large) audio projects.

@ MIDI Life Crisis

Yep, did that rather often. In fact the HD DID show up in "startup Disk". This made me curious enough to zero out the thing again and install 9.2.2.
It resulted in exactly the same situation. so now it lies on my desk, defying explanation.