BootX editing

I am currently in the middle (close to the end really) of a thorny 
Gentoo installation.  I believe I have the system fully installed, but I 
have had difficulty with getting it to boot to yaBoot, or indeed any 
boot loader now.

I've done a Stage 3 installation from a Universal CD on an Apple G5.  I 
have two hard-disks, dual processor 2.5 GHz if that is relevant.

On a quick and casual reading of some Mac websites I saw methods for 
editing the 'nvram' parameters which could let me pass boot-arguments so 
I thought this would be a way for the OS X BootX to redirect itself to 
what it sees as /dev/rdisk1 or what Gentoo calls /dev/sdb2, which is my 
bootstrap which should be used by yaBoot-static.

I used a sudo command to edit my boot arguments and now I can't get 
anything to boot.  I'm sending this from my pc.

I gave it:

sudo nvram boot-args="rd=*hd:2"

or at least that's how I remember it.  The problem with this seems to be 
that the count, naturally enough, starts from zero.  So it's looking for 
my non-existant third hard-drive to find a boot partition.  When I turn 
on it goes to a standard white and grey screen with the apple logo, 
meaning I think, that it is going into BootX.  The next step is it 
prints a screen of white text on a black background which I can't 
remember too well, but it goes looking for hd:2 and says something to 
the effect of 'Waiting for root device' or 'No response from root device'.

And that's it.

I have a few bootable CDs, the Ubuntu, the Gentoo Universal CD, Mandrake 
and Debian (which have never booted for me), and a Disk Warrior 3 cd 
which also isn't bootable despite what it claimed.  But even getting 
into a usuable interface, I need a way to edit BootX to take out any 
boot parameters.

I also am somewhat confused because working in the terminal I saw that 
what Gentoo considers /dev/sdb2 is to the Mac /dev/rdisk1.  This 
equivocation will most likely cause me further problems in getting the 
boot sequence rectified. 

I will post this to both this list, and to a Mac forum as it's more 
specifically a Mac issue, not Gentoo, but any advice or assistance would 
be greatly appreciated as I can't even turn on my computer at the moment.

Jon




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