Install OS X 10.0-10.3 from USB on New World Mac?

Hallo!

It would seem I am in a minor predicament with one of my older Macs. The machine in question is an iBook G3 Clamshell (233MHz, 256MB SRAM, 16MB VRAM, 1xUSB 1.1 edition, 1997) with "New World" Open Firmware v4.1.7f (the latest version for that model.) The problem is that the CD-R drive has not functioned for about a decade. The drive is not "broken" per-say, however it usually takes up to an hour to initialize a CD-R, 20+ min to read a single sector, and NEVER recognizes any kind of bootable disc. Not to mention it has to be held shut with electrical tape because the locking mechanism has been broken for about five or six years.

Given that it has a USB 1.1 port and my USB 2.0/3.0 flash disks are backwards compatible. This is where the real trouble comes in: One day while trying to upgrade from OS X 10.2.8 to 10.3 using the CD-R drive (before I had realized it didn't initialize boot discs) I had to hard boot the machine to shut it off. When I did this it corrupted the boot sector of the HDD leaving it unable to boot OS X, however the HDD could be read fine from a live USB. So I made a live USB of PowerPC Ubuntu and booted that, wiped the HDD and installed Ubuntu. Now I have grown horribly tired of using a Command-Line only environment on it, and would like to pass it on to my daughter as my grandfather did to me.

I have the Retail Universal Installer CD-R's (Yes I am positive they're retail) for OS X 10.2.0 Jaguar, as well as 10.3.9 Panther, however every attempt I have made to install both of these has failed. I have tried restoring the first CD directly to a USB 1.1/2.0 disk, I have tried ripping the .CDR/.ISO image from the install disc, converting it to a .DMG and restoring it to the USB disk, I have tried writing the image in CDR/ISO format directly to the USB disk using both sudo dd if="image path" of=/dev/"USB disk number", as well as sudo dd if="image path" of=/dev/r"USB disk number" bs=1M to no avail. I made sure with each attempt that the image was "locked" before writing it, and set to "r-- r-- r--" permissions, and have tried every method formatting the USB disk to HFS, HFS+, and HFS+ Journaled, none of which worked. I can still boot to a PPC Linux or PPC BSD disk fine. However while every attempt to make the OS X installer USB appears successful at first, and I am able to select it from the boot options menu (Option on boot) every variation I have made always starts booting fine at the Apple logo, the spindle appears for about 20-30 seconds, then the spindle disappears and the Apple logo is replaced by a prohibitive "no-go" sign and it hangs as though it cannot find either "yaboot" "boot.elf" or the "System" folder, the latter two I have confirmed to exist, and the first only existing in PowerPC Linux to my knowledge. I also booted to live PPC Linux and reformatted the HDD as HFS, and have tried using "free space" format as well just to be sure the installer wasn't failing to find a suitable install location, again to no avail. There are no hardware defunctions aside from the problems mentioned with the CD-R drive, and I am completely lost as to the problem. Any and all help is greatly appreciated as I need an operating system installed on it, and would prefer it not to be a CLI Linux installation, it doesn't matter if the result is 10.1, 10.2, or 10.3. Thanks!