g3 iBook can't boot directly from cd

Howdy folks,
I'm having problems bootstrapping my install on a clamshell
g3 ibook. 
The cdrom drive is very old now and will no read CD-R media,
although
commercial media like OSX cds and OpenBSD cd set work fine. 
I have an
external firewire CDRW drive, but it is not possible to boot
to it from
OpenFirmware.

So in the past, if an operating system installer would let
me, I could
put the yaboot, yaboot.conf, kernel, and ramdisk image all
on the first
HFS partition on the hard drive, and then boot things from
OpenFirmware
prompt.

I am trying to do this with Gentoo, but I am having a
problem.  The
kernel and ramdisk load, but even if use the
"dofirewire" kernel
argument, the firewire drive never spins up, and I end up at
the "enter
root device or "shell"" prompt.

I haven't found any kernel modules in the ramdisk filesystem
there, I
poked around in the busybox.

I have the squashfs image on the HFS partition, and on a usb
stick.  I
can't seem to mount the usb stick, the HFS partition, or get
to the
firewire cdrom.

I discovered the "bootfrom=" kernel argument, but
I have no idea what to
feed it.  Can I get to anything using that that I can't get
to from the
busybox?

Any ideers?



thanks

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