You wrote :

> Is there some OF trickery I can perform to get this machine to delay
> booting until the drive is spun up?

Yes, have a look at :
<http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/SystemDisk-tutorial/>
and especially "NVRAM patches"

> The other issue is, I'd like to have the machine boot after a power
> failure without someone having to hit the power button;  does anyone
> have any suggestions how to accomplish this?

There a couple of tricks with the power supply. I heard about an ADB
strap or something similar.

For this problem, you may have an answer on some comp.sys.mac.* group.


-- 
Xavier
http://www.freetibet.org
http://www.tibet.fr/