And that's a likely scenario? You actually have them on different bits of hardware or something? It's so arbitrary - why not split it further, what goes where? If you want to achieve splitting important stuff off to special storage, I'm sure that'd still be possible.

Also, why recover a system like that when I can just boot off a USB stick?

This is just a hack that's stuck around from when people had tiny drives and needed multiple partitions for these things, as far as I understand it.

Yes, of course. Is the common scenario in all old-school linux users and had saved me a lot of headaches. It simply works.

> Why recover a system like that when I can just boot off a USB stick?

Because I can. The basic parts of the system are still available and working. I don't need to reboot to fix the problem, I could mount a different and working /usr in seconds. Is not just "a hack", is a design.

How often do you provision systems where /usr and /bin are on different media? Do you have some reliability-tiering of the media or are they equivalent-but-separate? If it's the latter it seems like you're no better off.