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. USB stick, CompactFlash, SD card, SSD or NVMe) with a writable filesystem (non-iso9660 is a very good fit for this purpose).
For additional flexibility, rescue disk could be installed on an alternative media (e.g. another SD card, USB pendrive, CD-ROM) containing either:
- 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
- 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.