I tried Lars' suggestion on my Power Macintosh 8500, but it didn't 
work.  OpenFirmware complained that the string was too long.

At 9:06 PM -0400 5/23/01, Lars Kellogg-Stedman wrote:
>The various bits of open firmware documentation on netbsd.org suggest that
>for OF 1.05 systems, it is not possible to add the "wBoot" routine to the
>nvramrc after applying apple's "System Disk" patches + the via-cuda patch
>because of size restrictions.
>
>This is true.
>
>However, it suggests that the workaround -- putting the forth code itself
>in boot-command -- will only work on OF 2.0 or greater (see
>http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/nvedit.html).
>
>On my PM 7300, the following appears to have worked just fine:
>
>  0 > setenv boot-command begin ['] boot catch 1000 ms cr again
>
>So I can have the via-cuda patch and still deal with a disk that takes a
>little time to spin up after power-on.
>
>-- Lars
>
>--
>Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars@larsshack.org>