Help - I hosed myself!

["Karen Ellrick" <k-ellrick sctech co jp>]

I suddenly can't boot, even off a floppy, and I need help.  I know it's my
fault, and what I need to fix it is on the hard drive, but if I can't boot I
can't get to it.  Let me explain a little.

I am trying to set up a "standby" server to replace either of two others if
they go down (like a hardware failure or something).  I have wonderful
cron-ed scripts to ftp-get the contents of important directories (the key
one that is relevent to my question is /etc in its entirety) periodically,
storing them in /var/mirror, and those scripts are working fine.  I then
built two more scripts to run in the case of wanting to employ the standby
as one of the real ones.  For example, there is a directory /var/mirror/lex
that has copies of /etc, /home, and /var/log from the server called lex.
The script standby2lex(theoretically) moves /etc, /home, and /var/log to
/var/mirror/standby, and then moves the stored ones from /var/mirror/lex
into the real places.  I had tested it with non-critical directories, and
there were no bugs that I could find.  So holding my breath I tested the
real script.  Dummy me - I didn't check to see that everything was in place
before rebooting.  Instead of booting successfully as lex, which I expected,
the boot sequence (after some initial stuff that works okay) says:
   ...other stuff - no errors so far...
   INIT: cannot execute "/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit"
   INIT: Entering runlevel: 3
   INIT: cannot execute "/etc/rc.d/rc"
   INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
   INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
   INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
   INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
   INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
   INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
   INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel
...and then re-attempts the Id spawning things every five minutes ad
infinitum.  Nothing short of the power button has any effect.  I thought,
"No sweat - I'll boot from the emergency floppy I made when I installed
Linux," I thought (although I had never done that before).  But when I try
that, and type "rescue" when prompted to, it first says it is loading
rescue, and does some other stuff, and then says:
   VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER
I assumed that the same floppy serves as the "root floppy", and so I pressed
ENTER, and it said:
   RAMDISK: ext2 filesystem found at block 0
   RAMDISK: Loading 1440 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk...
   autodetecting RAID arrays
   autorun ...
   ... autorun DONE.
   VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
   Freeing unused kernel memory: 64k freed
   Warning: unable to open an initial console.
   Kernel panic: No init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.

Eh?  The keyboard does not appear to do anything (at least it doesn't echo,
and Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work), so how would I pass an option to the kernel?
And if I knew how to do that, what value would I set init to - the suspected
location of my /etc directory?  Even though I can't see the disk, I'm pretty
confident of the location of at least one if not two usable /etc
directories, if I can just get to them somehow and mv one of them back to
/etc.

Any ideas on how I can get my machine back, short of reinstalling Linux?

--------------------------------
Karen Ellrick
S & C Technology, Inc.
1-21-35 Kusatsu-shinmachi
Hiroshima  733-0834  Japan
(from U.S. 011-81, from Japan 0) 82-293-2838
--------------------------------