[rescue] Mac Disk bootable

[Joshua Boyd]

What makes a Mac disk bootable?  I have a SATA WD800 that has been my  
system disk for quite some time, but it seems to have a damaged file  
system[0].  I'm trying to use carboncopycloner to copy the contents  
to a Apple labeled WD1600 SATA drive.  CCC says it was successful,  
but then the machine refuses to boot from the new drive when I  
disconnect the old one.

As these are SATA drives, I don't have a firewire case to try booting  
externally from.

Are there any utilities on the install DVD that might help?

This is a Tiger machine, BTW.  10.4.11 to be exact.

Also, for a bit of background, the machine had started acting like it  
had a failing disk a few weeks ago (IO errors in dmesg), but when I  
tried moving it to a USB cable to rescue files, it operated  
perfectly.  Then, as a last ditch effort, I let it upgrade from  
10.4.10 to 10.4.11, and that made the disk mostly start behaving,  
except for the troubles I'm now having.  However, it certainly is no  
longer griping in dmesg.

[0]  I'm having two problems, which I'm hoping are connected.  First,  
there are 3 directories that I can't delete.  Finder and rmdir both  
say the directories aren't empty, but ls -al says they are empty.   
Second, there are three errors on the disk that disk can't correct in  
the extents overflow file.  Third, the machine says that the disk is  
full so it can't page anything more from memory, so what program do I  
want to kill?  However, the disk is only half full, and I've been  
keeping Activity Monitor open, and it says that there is 250-300 megs  
of inactive pages, so it isn't really out of memory even.  BTW, I  
don't know if this is an anomaly, but Activity Monitor often says  
that my VM size exceeds 12 gigs.