IBook wont boot from drives

Hello guys. I have a pretty technical question so if you're a rookie don't bother finishing this paragraph.
I have a 3g ibook 500mhz that wont boot any drives at all. It did at one point; I don't know what I did. It won't read cds or anything. I can hear it spinning, but it just refuses to mount them. I've tried reseting nvram and pram and defaulting settings, so it's more complicated than that. However, when I hold the option key down it displays my hard drive and cd. When I click on them they do nothing though, and when I click on the arrow to the right it just reloads the icons and spins the cd. If I click on the refresh button it does the same thing. Is there a way to get past this? Also, is there a way to somehow reinstall the firmware or point it to the hard drive and cd drive? Thanks.

Very strange that SHIFT does nothing, what about holding the Option Key down at Boot, what shows?
Ronda's covered much stuff, but maybe...
Does it boot into Open Firmware with CMDOption+of ?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42642
reset-nvram (press Enter)
set-defaults (press Enter)
reset-all (press Enter)
Have you done a PRAM reset...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238

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[Limitation of external boot media for Satellite, Satellite Pro C50 & C50D devices|http://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/kb0/TSB3B03JA0000R01.htm]
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IBook wont boot from drives

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