Lombard PowerBook G3 Won't Boot Off 8.6 CD

[Chris Horn]

You'll never believe it.

Tonight, I summoned the courage to delete all of the partitions I could using 
pdisk (booted into linux, running off the disk).  This was after I was able 
to boot off the OS X 10.3 CD (unfortunately, the installation failed).

So, I deleted the partitions, rebooted, held down 'c' and...

IT BOOTED!

So, the lesson of the day is that the OS 8.6 CD does look at the hard disk 
during it's boot process and will refuse to start up if it sees something 
abnormal.

Thanks for everyone's help.
chris.