I'm gonna give it a shot, once I get my main systems rebuilt on a new SD that hopefully crashes less often...

I was just hoping for a little data meanwhile, as I'd like to jump straight into stripping things down when I get to it.

And b-man, you're not quite right AFAICT, because the elinux Android on OMAP wiki says that Android (specifically, an SDK-derived rootfs, like we're chrooting to) can be booted directly, on some hardware; of course, we don't boot anything directly, as it all comes through the initfs and pivoting to the eventual rootfs, which rules that approach out completely for ITs (without getting very fancy)...