Installing on Quicksilver, drive problems

[Ben Snitkoff]

I have a 1 GHz DP Quicksilver, upon which I am trying to install Yellow 
Dog 3.0. I have a rather unique problem though, and as I have quite a 
bit of Linux experience I brought my question here rather than to the 
newbie list.

I have a 30 GB drive for Yellow Dog and the stock 80 GB for OS X. I 
already have OS X installed on the 80, and I have the 30 as the master 
drive, at the request of the Yellow Dog Installation Guide.

Mid last month I tried, for two weeks, to get Yellow Dog installed 
successfully, but I continually ran into the same problem. When I would 
install Yellow Dog after installing OS 9 and OS X, the Yellow Dog 
Installer would make my OS X partition not work. I'll try to be more 
specific:

I would re-boot after finishing the installation and yaboot would come 
up, when I pressed 'X' it would bring up the grey screen and the 10.2 
apple in the middle with the spinning rheostat  (is there a better word 
for that thing), and it would continue that for a few minutes, then 
kernel panic.

As a result of this, it also overwrote part of my 20 GB Drive on a 
separate ATA controller (Sonnet), upon which I kept my back-ups of 
data. So I've lost a lot of data out of this too. I was wondering, 
since I know that my OS X partition is hdb9 could I unplug my OS X 
drive, install linux, plug it back in and edit yaboot.conf?

Has anyone had a similar problem and a resolution?

Thanks,
Ben