Unable to boot from image - am I doing this right?

[jblundell]

This puzzled me for a while too, and the technical descriptions of the differences made little sense until finally I had one of those "aha" moments.

Any given volume can only be the boot drive for a particular system. What if you have several systems? Because an image is not bootable, then you could store many images on a single volume, giving you the possibility to fully restore any system from its unique image. If the volume were bootable, then it would be dedicated (for boot purposes at least) to only the system used to make the bootable copy. Of course, there is no reason not to put images from other systems on the bootable volume, after all, they are only data files.

I think I begin to understand it now, but someone please correct me (or delete this post!) if I'm off base.