rescue without floppy or CD?

[Greg Balls <greggyb@yahoo.com>]

I managed to severely disable my laptop last night.

First, the symptoms:
On boot, it gets to
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux Net4.0.
insmod: modprobe: cannot create /var/log/ksymoops/2003/0711.log
Read-only file system
insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.20-benh/kernel/net/unix/unix.o: cannot create
/var/log/ksymoops/2003/0711161051.ksyms Reod-only file system
insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.20-benh/kernel/net/unix/unix.o: cannot create
/var/log/ksymoops/20030711.log Read-only file system
INIT: Entering runlevel: 5

(It's the same no matter which runlevel I try.)  At which point it
looks like a lot failed, but maybe I can log in:
Debian GNU/Linux testing/unstable (none) tty1

(none) login:

I attempt to login as root, it checks my password, gives a standard
login message, and then this error:
Unable to change tty /dev/tty1: Read-only file system
login[21]: unable to change tty `/dev/tty1' for user `root'

login[21]: ROOT LOGIN on `tty1'


Then it reverts to a login prompt.  Logging in as myself is no better,
but instead of the ROOT LOGING line, I get:
No directory, logging in with HOME=/

and then a new login prompt.

Now the question: my CD drive on the laptop died about a year ago, and
I have no floppy drive, so is there any way to boot into a rescue mode
(that doesn't try to write log files, for instance) to try to fix this?

The only other option I can think of would be to mount the drive on
another computer and try to fix it that way, but of course that
requires a laptop-to-desktop IDE adapter that I don't have (yet).

Thanks,
Greg

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