installation help

I've been having problems with booting my g4 ibook and i lost the discs that came with it.
I went out and bought Leopard and an external hard drive and i cant get it to boot from dvd. I can hold down C and it just freezes at the startup screen, the gray apple appears and the gear just spins and then freezes. And it does the same thing holding option, it will pull up the screen and show the HD and the DVD. and i select the DVD.

Any help will be gladly appriciated

And by the way i dont care about the data on the HD so i wouldnt mind wiping it out and startin fresh if there is some way

Does your G4 iBook meet all the minimum system requirements for Leopard?

Maybe also try going through some of these steps
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106693
you could also try this
"# Will the disc's data copy to hard disk? If your computer will start up from any existing version of Mac OS, try copying the contents of the installation disc to your hard disk (if you have enough space). The ability to copy (but not install) the data is a simple test of the disc and of the hardware. If you encounter repeated errors, the hard disk or the disc may be unusable."

You can also use the disk utility to mirror the install discs to a portable hdd, I used this on my MacBook once and it worked very well, and was much faster then doing it from DVD.

Yes it does.
Its the 933mhz ibook
with additional 512mb of ram.

I'll check into that link real quick

It won't boot up at all to any of those things.
I can bring up user command but it freezes at the screen with the grey apple during any normal boot up. i've had it boot all the way up once a week ago but it froze up after a minute.