>My netwinder has a completely separate 'rescue' partition, that has a 
>kernel and a minimal set of tools.  The idea is that you *never* update 
>that (or only very rarely); you never mount it normally either.  Then when 
>things really go pear shaped you tell the BIOS to boot from that instead 
>of the normal partition and mount your screwed up world on that so that 
>you can fix it all up.
>
>The main advantage of that approach is that it avoids some of the cases 
>where you've screwed up /dev, say, and can nolonger boot from your main 
>partition at all.  But the cost is more disk space since you need a 
>kernel, /etc, and other bits and bobs on it.
>
>It's sort of like a 'floppy on the hard disk'.

sorta like keeping a copy of the install kernel with the md filesystem
and the crunchgen'ed binary install tools in the root of each
partition so that you can boot from anywhere and have a toolset to fix
stuff...

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