UPGARDING PROBLEMS!!! NO CD Drive on a Power Book Fire Wire

Question

First Of All Hello Everyone:
Here's my problem, a friend of mine ask me for help with he's power book Fire-wire the machine has (768 MB on RAM and 15 GB on HD),To upgrade his OS 9.2 to OS X, but (Here's the real problem) it has no cd or dvd drive, (Actually no cd drive at all), so i can't upgrade it to OSX. I Have tried with an external Iomega CD Drive (Predator Model) but it tells me it can't startup with an external cd drive, or simply doesn't recognize the external device when tried to startup the computer with the "C" key held down.
(It recognize the external cd when it's already stated up in OS 9.2)

Answer 1

Ikaro,
You cannot successfully drag-copy OSX like the 'Classic' OS.
If you could beg/borrow a FW CD-RW, you can boot the OSX CD and install via the burner.
Boot to the FW CD-RW in this manner: Load the OSX CD in the burner, then start up or restart while pressing the 'option' key, then select the OSX CD in the Startup Manager window.
Since you have a 10GB FW HD, you could connect it to another Mac (the host) that has FireWire ports and install OSX on the FW HD. The host should be able to start up to the new install on the FW HD so it can restart to the FW HD and finish up the install. If the host computer cannot boot to the FW HD, just let it restart to the internal HD, copy over CCC (see below), then properly unmount the FW HD. I believe you still should be able to boot the Pismo to the FW HD although I cannot be positive.
Now just connect the FW HD to your Powerbook (FireWire) a.k.a. Pismo, boot to the HD, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone a bootable copy to the Pismo's internal HD.
You will first have to download Carbon Copy Cloner from VersionTracker and place it on the host's HD. After finishing installing OSX on the FW HD, drag-copy CCC onto the FW HD. When preparing to CCC to the Pismo's internal HD, make sure you select "make bootable" in CCC's preferences.