Okay yeah not mounting /home is a good use for runlevel 1. That is certainly a tricky predicament. You can pass arguments when you flash into R&D mode but I'm not sure how about going about that. Tricky, tricky, tricky. I'm sure there is a "hack" to get this working but it's not going to be as simple as on a linux desktop/laptop environment. You are correct and definitely want to boot into runlevel 1 if possible.