How do get Leopard to boot from External 20 GB Hard Drive?

[Grim Reaper]

Although I have read that others have done it, I have been having no success with getting an external 20 GB USB drive running on the Dells (SSE2) with Tiger or Leopard. I have formatted that hard drive various ways and installed Kalway's Leopard installation over and over and I have tried the instructions in various "guides" to "bless" and "activate" the drive and/or partition (only one) without any success. Is there a "bullet proof" method of doing this?

 

Here's what I have available to do whatever is necessary:

I have legit copies of Tiger and Leopard.

I have an iMac 400 MHz which is running Tiger 10.4.11.

I have a Dell D600 laptop with a Pentium M 1.4 GHz with 1 GB of memory and an internal DVD player.

I have a Dell GX270 Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 1 GB of memory without an internal DVD player.

I have lots of external DVD burners and hard drives with Firewire and USB 2 interfaces.

I have: gparted live CD; DiskWarrior (10.4.8 boot); various other drive formatting utilities for Mac and PC; and various hacked Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5 installation DVDs for Intel.

 

The Dells have their BIOS set to boot from USB.