Trying to install Tiger via external FW drive.

I've got a PowerMac G4 which no longer has an internal CD/DVD drive as it's been displaced by three other large drives for it's use as a fileserver.
It's currently running 10.3.9 and I am trying to upgrade the Mac to run Tiger via an external firewire 400 DVD drive and a vanilla 10.4 retail install. I can get the computer to boot via the external drive, and can run all of it's utilities. AHT and Disk Util show no anomalies.
When I run the actual install however I get the message:
"There were errors installing. Please try again."
And that appears to be as far as I can get. At first (after ruling out disk errors) I thought it was a disk space issue (eg. temporary files) so I freed some more disk space (it's currently 11.6GB free so I figured this should be enough), except I still get the error.
Will OS X only install via an internal ComboDrive or SuperDrive?

Turns out my problem wasn't the external firewire drive I was attempting to upgrade with, it was the target disk which had some problems the installer didn't like. With a different drive (which MUST be formatted first!), I was able to install a new copy of OS X and import the majority of settings from the old drive.

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