Oh wow. This is brilliant! Thank you so, so very much for such a thoughtfully written and detailed walkthrough. I think it will be immensely helpful to a very wide audience. A lot of users, myself included, have been dealing with dead servers for a variety of reasons (see, for example, this thread about servers irretrievably crashing when an external drive is ejected).
I will try this method out on my crashed server in the next few days and report back. Thanks again!
