To let the gravity of the but sink in, this is the pair of scripts that I jammed in front of systemd that got it to somehow behave itself:
/sbin/init: #!/bin/sh echo "INIT: rc init is in startup" PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin /etc/rc.earlyboot || PS1='init# ' PS2='init >' PS4='init +' exec /bin/sh -i exec /lib/systemd/systemd /etc/rc.earlyboot: #!/bin/bash exec 0<>/dev/tty1 1>&0 2>&1 chvt /dev/tty1 emergency() { echo "The previos command failed. Starting shell to investigate." PS1='emergency# ' PS2='emergency> ' PS4='emergency+ ' /bin/bash } fsck -Asp ERR=$? if [ $((ERR & 2)) -ne 0 ] then echo "*** changed mounted filesystem, reboot requried ***" sleep 3 reboot -f fi if [ $ERR -ne 0 ] then emergency fi mount / -o remount,rw || emergency mount -a || emergency swapon -a || emergency exit 0