> Half of the time, it hangs while loading the stage 2 booter, somewhere
> in the numbers "01234.....," or after displaying the NetBSD booter
> header, and hanging with a "/" of the spinning cursor. Other times, it
> just doesn't start the stage 2, saying "no bootable HFS partition" or
> "DEFAULT CATCH."

If it's intermittent, it could be due to the drive not spinning up quickly 
enough. There are nvram commands which tell the boot process to wait for 
several seconds - try one of them.

> The thing is, it was actually working quite well until yesterday, when
> I decided to take my Radeon out of it and replace it with another card.
> Ideally, I'd use the on-board video, but I'm not sure it likes to boot
> without a monitor and keyboard attached on the internal card. Since I
> had to reset my OFW settings and boot into MacOS to change the video
> card settings for it, I lost whatever setting I made that actually made
> it work stably. I've tried using the XPostFacto nvramrc patches (what I
> think I was using with the Radeon), the System Disk patches, and
> patchless. Each brings its own set of fun errors.

Are you using video for NetBSD in place of the default serial console?

John