Can't boot from a cdrom drive work around?

I recently bought a couple computers at a university auction, and as 
far as I know they fully fit the requirements of Darwin, with I suppose 
an uncertainty with the graphics card and the ide drive....  But that's 
slightly a second factor.  I'm on dialup so I wasn't wanting to 
download a disk image, and my attempt at a darwin-ppc to linux-x86 
cross compiler I gave up on, since I was going to prefer that since I 
have a lot of source code from fink.  Anyway, after popping out and 
back in the battery to reset the bios to get around the password, I set 
it to boot from the cdrom, but it wouldn't boot from the cdrom, and 
just go into windows.  In the list, I disabled booting from the hard 
drive, so it should only try to boot from the cdrom, but it just gave 
me a fallback asking for a floppy.  The windows reinstall disk(never, 
ever will understand why Microsoft demands wiping a disk to install) 
wouldn't boot either.  So I'm fairly stuck in how to work around.  I 
thought of maybe getting a floppy and make it a boot floppy, but grub 
doesn't support chainloading into the cdrom drive.  For reference, the 
computers are gateway's, model e1600.  Because they were university 
computers, I don't know what they may have done and forgotten to undone 
to "forbid" it to boot from the cdrom drive.  They forgot to reset the 
BIOS password or take off the security lock, and fortunately I did have 
an Allen wrench set to open it up.  I've never really been a hardware 
type person, more of a software person, and most of my life used 
Macs(let's just say I'm loving more and more the "it just works" part 
of Macs).  Does anyone know how I could get the cd to boot?

And as a side question for later on that I may explore, has anyone had 
any success for a x86 to ppc cross compiler for darwin?  Maybe also 
compiling for Mac OS X?  Part of why I wanted the computers was for 
things like that, compiling programs that take forever such as X 
WIndows.  Most of the things I imagine I'd compile on it would run on 
it, and maybe use X Windows to display, but it'd be nice to compile 
applications to just transfer over to my iBook to run.