I have an ibook dual-usb G3 700MHz with a bad optical drive. I attached my external firewire DVD-RW and tried to boot from fedora core 6 ppc disc 1 and was unable to start the boot process at all.

This was not that supprising until I put the OSX restore DVD in and booted to that through firewire!

The FC6 discs passed the check media process when I used them to succesfully install FC6 on another ibook that has nearly identical specs.
The ibook I want to install on has no OS currently. As previously stated I succesfully booted into the OSX rescue DVD from the external firewire DVD writer.

Question #1: Does it make sense that I can boot to the OSX recue DVD and not Fedora disc 1 when I have no OS?
Question #2: Might the Fedora disc use a swap file on the HDD and the rescue DVD does not? What if the HDD is bad?

Sorry for the length of my post...and thanks for any insight,
Steve