mini G4 won't bring up Startup Manager

Hi folks,

My Mac mini G4 has been acting weird of late, and I'm attempting to reinstall OS X from a Firewire drive, but one of the weird things I just found it's doing is it won't boot the Startup Manager. If I boot it while holding the option key, it brings up the attached screen. It'll sit there with the hour glass for about 10-15 minutes then goes to a normal mouse cursor. If I click the round arrow (retry I guess?) the cursor goes back to the hour glass for another 10-15 minutes.

Afraid I have a hardware problem, but hoping someone more knowledgeable than me with Macs will have an idea.

Would greatly appreciate any help.

It's been acting odd booting from the internal HD, most times for the past couple months it goes to a screen with nothing but the Finder folder blinking on the screen, without getting into the normal boot process. Then if I let it sit there for about 10 minutes, eventually it would snap to life and boot just fine. But of course as soon as I try to replicate that to get a picture of what I'm describing, it's booting perfectly now on 8 attempts. That was happening before I got the Firewire drive, with no accessories plugged into the system.

I also realized my original subject wasn't right, I guess Startup Manager on the G4 is exactly what I showed a picture of, just that it wasn't finding any drives. I was expecting the newer Startup Manager screen that has screenshots on Apple's site and the one my MacBook Pro C2D uses.

Now, without changing anything other than doing my 40th power cycle of the past two days, when I get in Startup Manager it only shows my internal HD. Guessing it doesn't like my Firewire drive. When it's booted off the internal drive it can see and read the Firewire drive just fine. Just won't boot from it, though it does show it as an option in the Startup Disk and I can set it to boot there, it doesn't do so. Seems to try, but sits there for about a minute and then boots off the internal drive.