I stuffed up a build/install sequence on my laptop by accidentally
installing a -g compiled state, including kernel (filled split
partitions during tar sequence).

This meant I'd lost /sbin/init as well as any shared lib tool, whilst
single user. (incidentally, the kernel doesn't seem to fall back on
looking in /rescue for anything. Wouldn't this make sense,
if /sbin/init is hosed?) -instantly unusable system.

No floppy. No CD drive. Hmm. 

I thought about using Windows/XP to try and write a small bootable
image to USB, but it wasn't clear how to do the equivalent of a dd
command. (Is there a .exe which will do this? rawrite.exe seems to be
very floppy specific. A dd.exe might be a useful tool...)

But vmware got me there:

	make new vmware instance. make small empty hd file. point raw
	disk as second IDE, add .iso image of NetBSD 2.0.2 release as
	file-backed CD-ROM.

	when it boots, the vmware BIOS finds an empty hd, then falls to
	the CD-ROM, missing the second IDE (the problem with vmware here
	is you can't easily tell it to boot of CD first, and it was
	finding the bootblocks of the raw disk, until I made it the
	second IDE drive behind an empty Vmware file-backed HD image)

	interrupt the CD boot/sysinst, and you are in rescue mode: easy
	to remount partitions, re-install the system from build state.

So thats a big thank you to the NetBSD people for making a release
engine which is robust enough to work under vmware, and recover things.

-George