Saving old MacBook Core Duo

Hi there,

I found an old Macbook Core Duo while moving. It starts until the chime and shows a folder with a question marc. Supposedly the HDD is dead (I exchanged it for a different one - which obviously does not have any OS on it) - the optical drive is dead as well. Is there any way to make it boot from a USB drive? I happen to have a leopard installer DVD (Universal). So - can I make a bootable USB drive from that?

As I can't boot into OS X - I can't install ReFIT.

Any help would be highly appreciated.