I looked all through the bios settings. There is no option to boot from a usb device.. (the ports are usb 1, if that matters...)
it supports i.Link boot, but unfortunately the external CD player doesn't have firewire.
it also supports network boot, which is probably my most likely option, but I can't figure out how to do it. I plugged it into (cat 5) the router, and enabled the network boot option, but it didn't like it. I guess it was looking for something to be automatically loaded...