[pbedouk]

This onion is bringing tears to my eyes. So no the drive wasn't partitioned properly, but now it is, and yes I can boot from it!! Thank you for the education.

another question if I may. I think I'll have to erase and install to get rid of the conflict causing Finder to fail, which I am told is with one of my applications, but noone can help narrow it down. So I'll have to start clean and reinstall one at a time .. the question ... can I simply drag each application over from the backup volume to the newly created OS X volume?

Thanks again for your help ... it isn't only the application that's SuperDuper!