Also rescue tips and tricks as that's always interesting.
I have been using a Debian installer USB as I had it to hand (DVD image IIRC) but if I boot into a shell without mounting another root FS the number of utilities is quite limited (just busybox basics). For example just now I wanted gzip but it only had gunzip...
I feel like a shell started from the installer USB should have access to a lot more utilities because the files are there on the disk!
Does anyone know a way to set up a kind of USB like the debian installer where you can install packages from the installer into the live environment?
I mostly use systemrescueCD, but in fact it doesn't really matter. All I usually need is to mount the root filesystem, dev, sys and proc, then chroot into this environment and fix the breakage. Any live image will work for that.
That makes a lot more sense. I was thinking "all I need is a small set of really small utilities called busybox, and... the chonkiest modern web browser"...? :D