booting a 9000/785/C8000

I'm new to parisc (hppa) machines - never touched one before.
I'm trying to boot into linux so that i can do a simple
	dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/[hard drive]
I have about 25-30 machines to work on, so I'm looking for a rather clean 
solution :-)

I've tried both Gentoo's and Debian's hppa offerings, but am having the same 
problems on both (i've used gentoo x86/amd64 for years...):
1 - I can boot with 'console=tty0 sti=0/4/0/0' (as added by palo) and the boot 
process will stop with
	Console: colour dummy device 160x64
at this point, it is not hard locked - I can ctrl-alt-del to reboot.  it would 
probably sit there indefinitely - I did leave it for about 16-18 hours 
(running when I left work, still there the next day).
2 - I can boot without the 'console=tty0' and the kernel will load, but then 
fail when it can't find initial console (panic: kernel not syncing).

I've tried with both the AGP 8x Fire GL X1 that comes in the machine, and a 
PCI Rage XL of some sort.

The Gentoo kernel is 2.6.20 (most recent livecd, 2007.0), and debian's is also 
recent cd with 2.6.18 kernel.
In both cases, the complete kernel command line were pretty much the same 
(maybe they varied in looptype? ...and order of arguments)

TERM=linux root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc cdroot looptype=normal 
loop=/image.loop hda=scsi hdb=scsi console=tty0 sti=/0/4/0/0 sti_font=VGA8x16 
palo_kernel=0/vmlinux

while it is doing whatever it does prior to when it can be stopped to specify 
a boot path (analogous to x86 post?) it does say something along the lines 
of:
	console device			graph3
						0/4/0/0.0
	current console device	graph3
						0/04/0/0.256

So, upon seeing that tried to set the sti= kernel arg to those values, but 
found the same results.

anybody, anything?