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[josh256]

Certain Macs seem to be fussier than others when it comes to booting from USB. A solution I've found that works on all Intel Macs as well as the [few] G4s I've encountered is as follows - assuming you have a *valid* USB boot volume that doesn't work on specific/problematic macs but does on others:

- connect the USB drive
- power the mac on and hold option key
- a boot menu will appear without the USB drive listed as a bootable volume
- disconnect/reconnect the USB drive, whenever possible to a different USB port
- the USB drive should be re-detected and the new boot volume should appear as an option
  (if it doesn't appear there's a very good chance the volume isn't partitioned/blessed correctly)
- select the new boot volume and hit enter

Found it very frustrating that my OSX recover/install thumb drive worked 100% of the time on both my Mac Pro and Macbook Pro and 0% of the time on my wife's macbook and friend's iMac G4. This worked in both cases.