Problems booting from a DVD-RAM drive; formatting DVD-RAM media

Paul Ting cannot get his Power Mac G4 to boot from the Mac OS CD in his DVD-RAM drive that came with the G4. He writes: "It starts loading to get to the Macintosh OS 9 splash screen, allow the progress meter to move along slightly and then freezes. A friend with the same machine told me that he talked to Apple Technical Support who confirmed that this was an issue."

Update: Albertvaron writes: "I was able to resolve the problem by simply unplugging all USB devices."

A recent TIL article (#60235) states that: "Under Mac OS 9, the Help System incorrectly states that DVD-RAM media may be formatted by Drive Setup and suggests that a DVD-RAM disk could serve as a startup device if properly formatted. Drive Setup does not currently support formatting of DVD-RAM media nor is there currently provision for starting up from DVD-RAM discs." But this does not imply that you cannot startup for a CD-ROM disk.