sinclair_tm

That iBook can't boor from USB. A full hard drive would not keep it from booting from CD. I've booted many a Mac from a CD/DVD that had no hard drive at all. The only thing I can think of is that there may of been some firmware update that it didn't get for OS X because they can only be installed from OS 9, but I think they were all needed to run 10.3 in the first place. I'm thinking that you had a hardware failure that happened at the same time as the update. If it had Firewire ports, I'd say put it in target disk mode, but I don't think all the clam shell iBooks had Firewire ports.