Arrgh; I was rebooting my powerbook into MacOS 9 so I could watch a DVD on an external monitor. After shutting down OS 10 it couldn't find anything to boot. The 10.1 CD is not much of a rescue CD; it can't even install again on the drive ("this drive contains a different language foo than the CD so we can't touch it" - it's north american english on both as far as I know. Hmpfr.).
I was going to order a 40GB drive for it so I could upgrade in the process of getting it to work again; but then I'll have to buy an external USB/Firewire enclosure or something to temporarily get the old drive hooked up too to transfer the data. Suck!