Bootloader Problem, invalid boot-arguments

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'm posting this here in a Mac forum as it's more specifically a Mac issue, not Gentoo, any advice or assistance would be greatly appreciated as I can't even turn on my computer at the moment.

Although I am going to consider <a href="http://www.bombich.com/mactips/openfirmware.html">this</a> as an option. If this is a mistake, please let me know. As far as I can tell, a solution via Open Firmware could be my only option at the moment.

That page seems to have fixed the problem. I can get back to OS X, but still can't boot Gentoo and still can't tell why there's a difference between /dev/sdb2 and /dev/rdisk1, but that doesn't matter as I have a working computer again :-D