Startup disk!

After some research I found that the boot.efi file was required for leopard to recognize the external hard drive as bootable. The file has to be located in /System/Library/CoreServices. Since this file wasn't created by the Tiger installation I copied it from Leopard. The result was that I could select to boot from the device but that it hang at the logo screen.

I found some more information about the boot process and will see if I can make Tiger boot eventually.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Articles/BootProcess.html

I had a crash while I was copying files to find out the requirement for making the drive appear as a "Startup Disk" and I also got a hanging when I tried to maximize Excel on my external monitor so even if I try to avoid the buggy sections there appears to be new buggy sections appearing.