Installing onto laptop using external disc drive?

Here is my situation. We have a laptop at work that had a lot of permission and keychain bugs. After fighting with it on several different occasions, I decided that doing a clean reinstall things from scratch with a complete drive wipe. The biggest problem, which was not known to me is that the laptop cd drive is not working. Because I loaded it up as a firewire drive to do the wipe, I didn't know that the cd drive wasn't working. So now I am left with the problem of how do I install os 10 using an external drive.

I tried just putting the os install cd iinto my tower that I used to wipe the drive, but it just wants to install on the tower. And restarting the laptop with the externaml plugged into it and holding the c key doesn't work.

Any suggestions?

So I think I got it to work.... but if anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

I'll tell you how i installed 10.3 onto my key lime iBook G3, which i discovered wasn't able to read DVD's. It sounds like it might be what you described, but let's just make sure

1) Connect iBook to tower using firewire cable.
2) Boot iBook while holding down the "t" key to boot it as a firewire disk.
(i'm assuming this is how you wiped the disk in the first place)
3) Restart tower with 10.3 install media
4) The iBook showed up as a disk in the "install to disk" selector dialog.
5) Selected iBook as disk and installed 10.3
6) Disconnected iBook when tower was restarting
7) Restarted iBook and was greeted to OS X.

I've also heard that you can't boot a mac off a USB external drive, so i guess if the above method won't work you would need a firewire drive to read the install media, but i don't have a firewire drive so can somebody confirm this?

thanks, I will give that a shot if the method I am going through doesn't work.