[dspillett]

If you have access to the console (local physical machine, VM on a system that can expose the console, physical box that you have console access to via IPMI or other means), can you not specify that directive to be passed through via grub's interactive menu?

Failing that you could try the “single” directive and poke other configurations once booted in that mode.

A faf to be sure, but hopefully viable options (assuming the interactive menu hasn't been disabled to save a few seconds off boot time!).

[bravetraveler]

Absolutely can, I'm quite surprised at the 'what do' attitude around this. It's routine -- not in all organizations to be sure, but it's a solved problem.

There are options even without out of band management. You can choose to configure your systems with PXE -- if the installation ever fails, it can boot into a recovery environment over the network.