Newbie seeks saint for booting problems

[Daniel Snyder]

I'm installing Version 2.3 on a Blue and White G3, one of the first Blue
and Whites to hit the market. It's a 300 MHz, with a 6 gig HD and 320
megs of RAM. Because I only want Linux on the machine, I was doing the
single system install straight from the first CD. However, when I
started it up, I immediately ran into two problems:

1. I lost all power to my keyboard. This was remedied by using my SCSI
keyboard from my old Quadra, but it may bring to bear on the second
problem;

2. Rather than a splash screen, I was presented with a black screen with
a cursor. After a moment, I was presented with the following:

/pci/pci@d/mac-io@5/ata-3@20000/disk@0:2,yaboot.conf: Unknown or corrupt 
file system
can't open config file
welcome to yaboot version 1.3.6...

I tried hitting return to launch the install, to no avail; I got the

boot:

command promp again and again. So I tried

install-text

and was rewarded with the following:

Please wait, loading kernel...
install-text:2,/vmlinux:
Unable to open file, Invalid device
boot:

I suppose I could go ahead and partition the hard disk from the install
CD, but I'm a little reluctant to do so. Partly, this is because of my
natural paranoia, but it's also because it might be a hardware problem.
If so, I'd have no software AND no prospects of installing.

The only clue I have as to what the hardware problem might be is that my
G3 came with faulty wiring, and I was losing power to my hard disk for
a while. They were able to solve this problem by supplying power from an
unused slot, and I can't imagine how this would affect me now.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?