Installing OS X Panther on New Hard Driv

[RickO]

We recently took ownership of a used G4 iMac from my father. The original hard drive was faulty and needed to be replaced according to an Authorized Apple Dealer in MA. We purchased and installed a new 80GB 7200 rpm drive, setting the jumpers based on the old hard drive. The machine fires up and presents the alternating flashing "?" and Face in the finder. This makes sense as there isn't an os installed on the machine yet. When we attempt to start the machine and boot of the cd (holding down the C key), nothing happens for several seconds, then the cd door pops open and the ?/Face combination appears. How can we tell if the cd drive is actually spinning during the boot process and there isnt anything wrong with it? Can we try and boot the machine from within the firmware (We can CTRL Z, get access to the > prompt and run a few simple commands. There is one option, "mac-boot" - can we use a variable on that commandline to invoke the installation from the cd? Thanks