PowerMac G4 Sawtooth/AGP restoration

Hi all. I've bought a 400MHz Sawtooth, and have cleaned the machine inside and out, and am now trying to clean install Mac OS9 and OS X Tiger. This is causing huge problems

1. The optical drive seems to read CD's fine but will not offer to boot off them via the menu or open firmware. CDR's burnt on Windows (ImgBurn) and modern Mac. It will not read any DVD's at all so that laser has failed.

2. I've bought a NOS Pioneer 116, and that doesn't work, so that can't be used.

3. I've created a bootable USB key with `dd` but can't get that to boot via open firmware either.

It's all feeling very difficult now! The options I can think of are:

1. Buy another IDE optical drive and hope for the best

2. Buy a new SATA DVD drive and use a SATA/IDE converter

3. Look into some sort of firewire option?

Would like to know what people think, especially if it will be possible to install OS9/X and probably MorphOS from a Firewire HDD?