iMac 9,1 boot issue, no OS found folder flashing

Greetings,

I am working on a college campus and I ran into a unique issue today. We have a lab that is all iMac 9,1 models that are triple booted. During the refresh for the coming summer semester I took a machine out of circulation and began building my images. I had a minor snafu with our linux boot and an issue between its gptsync and the gptsync from refit. That is where the problem began. These machines have not had a full fresh image deployed in several years.

The problem developed when I was removing refit and prepping to reboot to my linux live CD to complete an update of the GPT and MBR hybrid table using debian gptsync. I took care of that whole process and everything checked out on linux with fsck prior to rebooting. I rebooted the machine, held down option and much to my surprise I found that I was presented with the open firmware password screen. Not good. I had used the startup disk utility to set the disk to my anaconda fedora install CD. I managed to clear the OF password issue and then rebooted again. I was able to clear the PRAM and I reset the SMC. Everything seemed to be going well until I rebooted again.

Once I did this reboot I waited a while, waited some more, then I got the grey flashing folder with the question mark icon of no valid OS found. Now what has been a trying and frustrating process became worse. I decided to try my netboot and reset the the startup disk from there. I was easily able to netboot into my DeployStudio netboot and use the disk utility to verify and repair both permissions and the disk. No issues were found so I set it as the startup disk using the utility in DS and rebooted....grey folder of doom again...Tried again with my Snow Leopard install disk, booted, saw all the drives again, so I chose macintosh HD again....still the grey folder...

My ultimate question is this...Does anyone have an idea on how I can fix this short of using DS to pull my images, use diskutility to destroy my partitions and start over? I can pull the images no problem, but this is a very very time consuming process on a 100 Mbps network with high traffic due to many senior engineering design projects due soon. Has anyone else had this same issue?