Right, that seemed to be the mtab solution Debian were angling toward.  I think there were some odd edge cases where it didn&#x27;t behave well, though I don&#x27;t recall what those were.  Perhaps the ability to specifically edit the contents to allow fixing of fubared mounts -- almost certainly loopback or NFS, both of which get quite twitchy at times.<p>I don&#x27;t recall my precise thinking on a clean root vs. &#x2F;usr split on the recovery partition, though it may have avoided some confusion over binaries. Or perhaps that you could mount the &#x2F;usr partition itself independently if you wanted, assuming primary root was hosed.<p>Not being able to mount a separate &#x2F;usr would negate that option.