NT was an unstable POS. It DID crash, and you advocate having a secondary OS partition, just to replace files on the primary OS partition?
It screwed up about the same amount of the time whether it was on FAT or NTFS, IIRC - I saw no advantage to running the OS on NTFS. Apps, data, that's another story..
I assume, O Professional Shill (*grin*), that since your 'decent recovery plan' seems to include redundant OS partitions on every machine, that you DIDN'T just RRR for what might be a trivial problem (if the OS partition was accessible)? I'm curious about the licensing involved, too - does MS not care about two MS-OS partitions on the same box?
And - don't worry. Back in those days, I was in charge, and I did not like using Windows for any server tasks (we did have some development servers - it was a software house). We used the AS/400 for DB, and OS/2 for file & print...
I've heard about the Recovery Console for 2000, but I don't know what, exactly, it can do - as my laptop hasn't needed it, yet (only 3 OS crashes so far, all fine on reboot).