My, splashingmedia, you really are in a Catch-22. Don't see anything about booting from that drive in Jaguar from xlr8yourmac.com, the reports are mostly about burn support in 10.3, but someone running Panther left this comment:
"Hmm...what was that really important test you wanted us to do...Oh yeah! Is it bootable! Duh. Like a dope, I restarted with the Panther disc in the drive holding control C, option C, command C, nothing worked. I thought that was supposed to do it, where'd I read that? Anyway, specified to boot from the disc within OSX once I restarted again...restarted, boom, I'm in. Ran Disk Utility, verified the disks, repaired them, permissions, all for the hell of it. All smooth."
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/action.lasso?-search
Also you might have to set the jumpers to Master, in order to boot, so so if they are set to Slave now you could try changing that. But it really looks like this drive may well only boot for Macs under Panther; Pioneer only lists it as PC compatible, so you won't find any drivers that you can use from them. Sorry.
I wonder if you had a spare partition or a second HD if it would be possible to mount the Panther install CD 1 and save it as a disk image using Disk Utilities, then boot from that to install on the target volume. Am sure somebody else here could answer that one. (Of course, if you only have one, single volume HD you can't partition it now without erasing everything on it anyway...)
Unfortunately, xlr8's own forums are no longer accepting new membership. But welcome to this one.
