Rescue disk
A Rescue disk also known as repair disk allows to easily repair an installation that may become faulty due to a package conflict or misconfiguration. To preempt this, a wise precaution would be to prepare and maintain a rescue disk. A rescue disk provides a platform to execute commands using chroot.
Preparation
- Alpine linux installation media could be retained for this purpose.
- A customizable boot device for Alpine Linux, e.g. a USB-Stick/CompactFlash/SDCard or SSD/NVMe harddisk based boot device with a writable filesystem i.e, non-iso9660 is also a very good fit for this purpose.
For additional flexibility, rescue disk could be installed on an alternative media (another SD card, USB pendrive, CD-ROM, etc) containing either:-
- (a) a different Alpine Linux version to your workstation's i.e. current-stable vs Edge or vice-versa in case your current impasse is due to a temporary conflict, say, in Edge, it may not manifest in current-stable
- (b) a different distribution
This would be handy as a fallback workstation operating system to investigate the issue
Maintenance
Remember to copy over working .config files, user guides, etc. from your current system onto the rescue disk beforehand.
Tip: Update the rescue disk periodically, particularly if major changes are made to your system.