Rev. A iMac Won't Boot From CD

Ok, this has stumped me. My brother gave me an old Rev. A iMac (233mhz, 128mb RAM), and I wanted to outfit it so my kid could play CD games and surf the 'Net (he's only 3, so we're not talking hard to please here).
Anyway, I bought a brand new 40GB Seagate 7200 ATA drive to replace the original 4GB drive so that I could install Panther for the stability. I installed it today, then popped in the OSX installation Disk 1, and it wouldn't boot. Got the flashing question mark/folder.
So I figured I might have to boot with the old OS, so I popped in the copy of 9.0 that came with my G3 Blueberry, and that started to boot (happy Mac appeared), but a few seconds later I got a popup that said, "A Fatal Error Has Occurred." My only option was to restart.
I've been looking for a while at issues already discussed that are sort of related to this, but nothing exactly with that error. I suspect it's a firmware problem, but if it won't even boot off the 9.2 CD, how can I update it?
Furthermore, the drive was right out of the baggie brand new. I assumed that even though it was completely blank, I could still boot up with an install CD and initialize the disk, get the firmware on there and install a system.
Now I'm thinking from what I've read in other threads that in order for success to be achieved, I'm going to have to boot up and install from the original OS8.1 CD that came with the machine, then incrementally upgrade the from there.
Any help would be kindly appreciated. The fatal error message and the inability to boot from a system CD scares me.
iMac G3 533mhz 256M/120G   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

OS X needs to be on the first partition, OS 9 can be on the second. I think you have to have an installed an OS on the first partition so the boot blocks are set. I believe also that you have to have 8.5 or higher to do the OS X installation. The process on my PowerBook G3 Wallstreet was to install 9.2 first and then OS X following the guide in the Read Me on the install disk. I already had 9.1 on it at the time.
I remember it was a pain. I had to take it to work, back up the hard drive, partition and install. At the time it was 10.0 and ran so treacle slow. 10.1 fixed that, and it still has 10.1.5 on it running fine.
Also, the disk format has to be HFS+, not HFS. If you have an external drive, then you could install and do your upgrades on that until you can install on the internal.
There is also an iMac Firmware updater you will need to run available from Apple.com.

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    See the following Articles:
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    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25517 Mac OS: Versions, builds included with PowerPC Macs (since 1998)
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    G5, PowerBook G4, imac   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   G5, powerbook, imac

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    After a successful install and update, connect the Firewire drive to the Graphite and see if it will start up (if necessary, use the Option key on startup).
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    Jeff
    Mini 1.25, 12 Al PB 1.5, PTP 250, WS PB G3, 3xiMac 400 (OS 9.1)   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   Wireless KB/Mouse, AEBS, 80 GB OWC FW HD

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