G4 PowerMac will not Boot!!

Hi, A friend has asked me for some help with his 733Mhz G4 PowrMac. At the moment the machine has OSX 10.4 installed. An external DVD reader/writer was borrowed to install this, as the optical drive is only a CD reader/writer. The G4 will not boot at the moment, you hear the start up chime and then, the swirly start up thing just keeps swirling. I thought the best thing to do was try to access Disk Utility. But we no longer has access to the external DVD RW. My question is. Is there anything else that we can boot the machine from i.e. Ipod, large USB pen drive. I'm not sure if this can be done?? If it can, could someone please post up guide to this!! Any help would be great!! Thanks in advance!!

Will it boot in Safe Mode? See
What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392
Look at this link.
*Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck*
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
 Cheers, Tom

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