Boot from external CD Drive?

I have an Aluminum Power Book G4 15" 1.67 Ghz. I'm not sure which OS is on it. I have purchased it from a buddy and the thing has issues which is why I got it for next to nothing. It will load to the desktop but I can't see anything (please don't try and diagnose, I've spent hours on here already doing that).

I got the retail version of leopard and wanted to do a clean install of the OS. After an hour on the phone with Apple, we've come to the conclusion that the disc drive is bad and I am unable to boot from it.

And Finally.....to the question....

Can I boot from an external device? If I can't view the desktop and I can't boot from the cd drive cause the drive is bad.....how in the world can I do a re-install of the OS?

Any help is much appreciated....thanks!

Oh yeah....forgot to mention that I already tried to boot from an external CD Drive and it didn't work. Apple support told me to hold down OPTION during startup and it will list my bootable devices. It doesn't list the internal drive or the external....only shows the harddrive

What type of external CD drive did you try? Your machine is probably not going to boot from any external device that's USB 2.0. Some PPC machines will boot from a USB device but most need Firewire in order to boot. I suggest you try a Firewire external CD drive instead.

Regards.