OS recovery

[Mark]

I made the mistake of attempting to install the nvidia 173 driver on
my machine (which has a GeForce 7200S video card in it).  I'm looking
for the right nvidia driver because the generic one I'm running
(nouveau) doesn't seem to be able to do full 1920x1080 without some
artifact or other.

After I downloaded the driver with Synaptic and rebooted, the machine
was dead - it refused to come up past the boot prom (!).

With a little finagling and wasting an hour or more, I was able to
reinstall U10.10 from CD to a spare boot and root partition, then boot
them and futz with the grub config enough to get it to boot from the
right /boot and, shortly thereafter, the right root.

Needless to say, I now have my primary /boot and / backed up on the
spares (they weren't before - stupid me).

However, I can't help wondering what, if any, is a better recovery
method when the primary /boot fails before the OS goes anywhere.

(This might have had something to do with the fact that I also had
previously set my /dev/sdb to be the boot disk in the PROM and
completely forgot about that little detail....)

Any suggestions?

Mark