“Nigel Kukard posted an announcement for an early version of
‘BootUtils’. The utilities currently support the ext2, ext3, jfs,
reiserfs and xfs filesystems. He explained:“‘BootUtils is a collection of utilities to facilitate booting
of modern Kernel 2.6 based systems. BootUtils is designed for
initramfs, although volunteers to add support for initrd are
welcome. The process of finding the root volume either by label or
explicit label= on the kernel command line, mounting it and
‘switchroot’ing is automated. BootUtils can also drop to emergency
shell if the root volume cannot be mounted. Why not even start sshd
and allow admin login if the box is in a remote location…?'”