mounting a drive

I'd suggest you take a look at this (http://www.bombich.com/mactips/openfirmware.html)page and the linked pages on it. Together it makes for a good explanation and user guide to Open Firmware (sigle user mode) and it includes info on boot devices.

not really what i need. i don't get a blinking ? for one. now im having a different problem. when i boot from a different drive i can't seem to mount the dead drive. i can only get access to the boot volume, i guess. also the panic happens when i try to change to bad drive from read only to read write.

It sounds like there may be some kind of damage to the drive in question. If you boot from the OS installer disk, can you launch Disk Utility and repair it? At least try to verify it and see if there are any errors.

the drive only works when mounted read only. normaly when starting up drives are read write. when booting in single user mode they are read only. i can run fsck but it doesn't do ****. im not sure what is doing this.
right now im going to try booting from Ubuntu linux LiveCD, hopfuly it will work.
...it's damn amazing how little information there is on this crap.

normaly when starting up drives are read write. when booting in single user mode they are read only.
You aren't explaining yourself well enough for me to understand what is happening - what you have done and what you see and what error messages you received etc.

For example, I'm not sure if your above statement about drives being read-only in single user mode was intended to be merely a statement of fact or a question or complaint of some sort.

Yes, the drive is mounted read-only by default in single-user mode.
If you want to change something from single-user mode, you need to mount it read-write with the command:
/sbin/mount -uw /

Did 'fsck -fy' find anything to fix in the file system?
If so, you need to repeat that command immediately and keep repeating until it says the disk is okay.

what ever.. i was able to get my stuff off with ubuntu