Rescue Mode
Anaconda provides a rescue mode to let a user recover from somehow breaking their system. Generally, the breakages this is useful for are the ones where your system is left entirely unbootable.
Recovery Methods
The main functionality provided by rescue mode at present is a discovery of installations and then mounting of them. After that, you are dropping into a shell where you can perform recovery tasks by hand.
Future Thoughts
It regularly comes up that it would be nice to be able to run common tasks without having to use the shell directly. Patches/scripts to do some common recovery operations are definitely worth looking into integrating along with a simple menu in rescue mode to provide a list of the things that you can do. Some commonly suggested things include:
- Re-install the bootloader
- Recreate initrd
- Easy way to reinstall packages
- 'your idea here'
If you're interested in working on some things like this, get a quick script together and then send mail to anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com to discuss the integration aspect.
A number of ideas relating to Rescue Mode were mentioned in this thread on the fedora-devel mailing list: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg01178.html