[deleted]
Eric, many thanks for your work!
I had some issues recently with a CentOS 7 many related to systemd and all the useless automation that they have built in. The system crushed on me and became unusable after I installed some the Linux Standard Base packages. That's the POSIX compliance.
I tried to get into emergency but the system was crushing on me anyway so I finally managed to get a shell by passing the ksh as init even though ksh was not present on the system. I was able to bring up network and stuff and finally burned a ISO of Obarun and tried running runit-init instead. Out of luck, though ...
Anyways the partitions were encrypted and I also had a LVM on a extended partition also encrypted and fetching packages needed for mounting the said drives failed because of systemd dependencies. I was unable to access the said partition lucky that I remembered that I didn't had anything on it so I rescued the data I needed and made a fresh install.