FOLLOW-UP: EFI MacBook Pro Firmware Issue SOLVED (for me, at least)

[Zoidberg]

BGnR -- I'm sure; I'm the only one who uses it. I got the drive from OWC months back. Put it in an On The Go enclosure and formatted it (again, using the defaults in Disk Utility; the only thing I remember doing is unchecking the "install OS 9 drivers" box and making sure it was set as journaled.) After that, I swapped it out for the internal, did the clone/restore bit, and then erased the old external in D/U in the same manner.

And the same goes for all the backup drives I've ever used; I always erase them via D/U before use.

All I can figure is APM is the default setting, since I most definitely never changed it to that.