Panther Install Nightmare

[b]

A while ago, I had either a $40 belkin cable that shorted (sent juice 
to the data lines in the firewire bus, frying the unprotedted (no 11 
cent breaker on the ->) firewire port on my 667.

no firewire.

Last fall a younf fellow ran off with the same Ti, and dropped it, 
from about 18 to 20 feet up an escalator near the concourse near Penn 
station. A 'stick' supporting a young potted plant, rammed its way up 
the DVD/CD slot and murdered the internal drive. The Ti, for the most 
part, survived....

and now the latest, aftyer trying to boot Panther Installer from a 
firewire CD burner/reader, plugged into a Firewire 800 port in the PC 
card bus/slot (to no avail), earlier this week, we come to today...



well, i borrowed an Iomega zip650 from the only folks at work that use Macs.

It's a USB CD drive. I tested it by copying an Adobe app installer to 
a CD in it, burned it, ejected, rloaded, launched, no problem

So, I pop in the Panther Installer CD1, and it goes through the usual 
double-click, restart... no go, the box comes on, blinks once, and 
defaults to Jag

so, I try again, hold down the "C" key, same deal.

And again, select the Cd in Startup Disk, it shows up, reboot, no go

I'll save a little bandwidth by summing up this way: I tried:

Startup Disk + "C" key
Restart off Installer, plus Startup Disk +"C" key

and even the Option key boot:
that was fun, it took the startup screen 10 minutes, but sure enough, 
the Installer icon finally showed up.

But it didn't launch

Every time, the Iomega is blinking like mad, and the few times where 
it seemed like my mac was ready to launch... the grey Apple turned 
into a circle with a line (diagonally) through it, while the Iomega 
just kept a -now- unblinking solid green light... no in/out, from the 
looks of it.

Apple says: All i need is builtin USB,..... check
2 gigs of free drive space, .....check check check, and a half
PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 ....... check (667 Ti-Book)
at last 128 MB RAM ........ check X 9
builtin diplay or display connected to Apple-supplied video card... check

So, what's up with this? Is there some trick to it? Am I to believe 
that one can't install from a USB CD drive into the builtin USB ports?

Why is Apple the only software company on Earth that requires its OS 
installer to boot the machine?

Does anyne have even a semblance of an idea on what i can actuallt 
do? I'll happily entertain anything feasible. Thank you

~flipper