Last night, while upgrading to the 2.6.17 kernel - that kept failing at every step you could think of, such as e1000 drivers and package build for vmlinuz - I left it alone to try compiling one last time and went to sleep. At 4 AM, when I woke up to get a glass of water, I noticed the build went nuts again and turned the computer off as it was sitting at the root prompt.

It seems I screwed up Yaboot before that . . .now that I remember, it was upon trying to install Splashy. Now Yaboot is giving me "Config file read error, 674 bytes. Syntax error at line 18 in \\yaboot.conf."

I can't get into Linux and no usable boot devices show. Not "Linux", not "old."

I've tried checking on the Debian install CD to reinstall Yaboot, but that wants me to partition the drive which will destroy my data and subsequently everything I managed to take from one OS install to the other.

OpenFirmware isn't responding all that well to commands such as "boot hd:4,\boot\initrd.img" which is what I'd think would get me to a point directly before the system boots up in a usable state.

I can't find any way to alter yaboot.conf from either OpenFirmware or the Debian installer shell, or I would have done it a while ago.

Is there any way I can fix the bootloader without having to reinstall the entire system?

(EDIT: I have an Ubuntu Live CD but mounting the main Debian partition with "sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hda4 /mnt" and then changing the yaboot file to reflect an earlier state, since I backed it up before changing for Splashy, didn't work. The rescue-powerpc option hasn't worked for yaboot.conf either.)

(EDIT 2: Mounting /proc and /usr through the rescue function and then running ybin hasn't worked.)

(EDIT 3: Got it. Also had to remove Splashy via dpkg --purge before it would let me back in KDE.)