Jacked up Superdrive in Powermac G4

[Ninja Guidan]

Hi. I need some help. I have a Powermac G4 and the superdrive doesn't like any CD that gets put in. It spits it out everytime. I can't boot from the drive either while holding down C at startup. My question is can I boot from an external firewire CDRW/DVD drive? It has OS 9.2 and I want to back up everything to CDs, then rebuild and upgrade to 10.4. If I can boot from an external CDRW/DVD drive, then are there any special steps I should know about? If I can't boot from an external drive, then does anyone know where I can get a replacement internal drive? I believe the drive in there now is a Pioneer DVR-103.

Thanks...

 

[exeterbohemian]

well, i know that it's at least possible to boot from an external firewire hard drive. as far as optical drives are concerned, i honestly have no idea. although wouldn't be surprised if you could. i'm not entirely certain however why you'd need to be booting from the optical drive in the first place. you should be able to back everything up to an external drive just fine from within os 9. that said, installing 10.4 might require you to book from the dvd itself. i can't seem to remember anymore.