Troubleshoot a 1.25GHz With Me!

I am not getting paid for this so I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. It's for a co-worker who bought the 1.25GHz G4 on Craigslist for $100.
It will not accept a disc. It came with the original discs so I was hoping I could give it a little help, no go. It will turn on but sometimes nothing happens on the screen. Sometimes it will boot to a prompt screen. I type "mac-boot" and the ? mark folder once it boots.
So, I assume both the combo drive and HD are bad. What do you think?

What exactly happens with the Install #1 CD in the drive? Does it spit it out?

It's very likely the Optical drive is toast. Not sure on the Hard Drive. If you could get it to boot from the CD you of course run the hardware test and see if the drive is bad.

I put it and nothing happens. It doesn't accept it. I originally thought a disc was in there so I did the mouse button at startup to eject it. There was no spin-up which should happen even if there isn't a disc in there, right?
I thought maybe the mechanism that sucks in the disc broke so I put in the disc and pushed it further in with my car key. It went all the way in but nothing happened. It just slipped right out when I tipped the mini.

Try reseting the nvram in open firmware.

0 > reset-nvram
Press Return
0 > reset-all
Press Return

Have you tried Target Disk mode with your Mac?

With the power on it will suck in in the rest of the way at a certain point. That drive is really shot.

What Soulwar suggested can not hurt, but that drive sounds really messed up.

Soulwar said:

Try reseting the nvram in open firmware.

0 > reset-nvram
Press Return
0 > reset-all
Press Return

Have you tried Target Disk mode with your Mac?

Click to expand...

I will try that.
I am trying to get the Target Disk mode to work now without luck.