I also have HPUX 11i systems. When you say you implemented "security changes that can't be back tracked". What do you mean by that???
First, I would go back and undo whatever you did. If you changed the permissions on the master.d/* files, change them back. When I look on my box I see that all the files are read only except for one file. It is called "krm". This file is 644. All the rest should be 444. Also, it is owned by root:sys all the others are owned by bin:bin. Hope this helps.
root:/usr/conf/master.d
# ll
total 308
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4263 Nov 5 1999 SCentIf
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4187 Mar 8 2002 autofs
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3878 Jun 14 2001 btlan6
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 19314 Jun 26 2001 core-hpux
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3808 Jan 11 1999 corelan
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 1878 Oct 24 1997 dlkm
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4028 Dec 19 2001 evp
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3504 Sep 21 1998 fcgsc
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 5828 Jun 15 2001 fcms
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 1043 Jun 1 2000 fs-tune
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 719 Dec 1 2001 func0
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4317 Feb 9 2002 gvid
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 951 Aug 29 2000 krm
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4094 Jul 20 2001 lan
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3768 Dec 12 2001 lan100bt-core
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4310 Oct 24 1997 lvm
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3682 Dec 12 2001 maclan
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4576 Apr 9 2002 net
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4596 Mar 8 2002 nfs
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3991 Oct 24 1997 nms
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 490 Jun 22 1999 pmon
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4002 Nov 7 1997 proc-resrc-mgr
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 491 Dec 17 2001 scsi-disk
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 1332 Dec 7 2001 scsi-tune
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4309 Jun 14 2001 side
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4321 Mar 13 2000 sioflop
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4275 Oct 24 1997 spt
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 6489 Oct 24 1997 streams
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4609 Oct 24 1997 streams-telnet
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4749 Oct 24 1997 streams-tio
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4226 Nov 4 1999 superio
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 349 Sep 27 2000 sysvipc-tune
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 3164 May 9 2001 td
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4726 Oct 5 2001 usb
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 260 Jun 22 1999 vm-tune
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 4954 May 24 2001 vxfs
If you can't do that, you at least can use "kmtune" to modify parms. You should be able to modify any kernel parm with it.
BTW, I can't think of settings that would prevent root from seeing its own kernel parms???
It would help if you gave us some idea of what you changed.