Lombard PowerBook G3 Won't Boot Off 8.6 CD

[Chris Horn]

I sent this the other day, but it doesn't appear as if the list ever
received it.

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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.