James:Don't believe that the boottime.kmap.gz is your problem. That just loads the keymap into memory. I fixed the Quadra 900 once by looking for instances of where the rtc was loaded in the initialization scripts. That was about 2 or 3 years ago. If you can't figure it out in 2 or 3 days, I'll boot my Quadra 950 and find them again.
I had it running to the point where you didn't have to use control c to boot into the system. And when you shutdown the system, the shutdown sequence also references the rtc again. So you'll have to find that and work around that so you can shutdown properly. But, basically, that's why you can't ever complete the install on these systems. The installer has to complete the install on these systems. Then the system will boot normally. The problem with the rtc on the Quadra 9xx series prevents the install from completeing. Hence the initialization scripts never get changed so you get a normal startup script.
You might search the posts on this newsgroup. I believe I was the last one who had reported this problem. Ray Knight had told me what the problem was. I just did some reading in the /etc/init.d/ directory. I believe what you're looking for is found in the hwclock.sh file and in the hwclockfirst.sh files. These 2 startup scripts set the system time from the Hardware Clock. Of course, the hardware clock bug hasn't been fixed. These 2 scripts occur in the startup and shutdown scripts to set the system clock to the hardware clock of vice versa. Read the man mage on hwclock for more details.
Can't remember exactly what I did with these files. Look in the /etc/rcS.d and the /etc/rc6.d directories (the startup scripts directory and the shutdown scripts directory respectively). Here you'll find the symbolic links to the hwclock.sh and the hwclockfirst.sh files. These two scripts reference the buggy real time clock or hardware clock or whatever. When this happens your system locks up. Probably the easiest thing to do is to just move the symbolic links in these two directories so that they are not referenced on startup or shutdown.
You should find that your Quadra 9xx runs like a charm. You just can't really use it for reliable timekeeping purposes.
Hank
find where the /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz is loaded and uncomment the line. If the initscripts are too confusing to follow try simply hide that file to another name so it won't find it. Richard