It did drop me into emergency mode with a virtual text console. I was able to get to a desktop by typing init 5 one the boot process was complete.

Entering the command below:
true ; ( set -x
cat /proc/cmdline
cat /proc/partitions
fdisk -l /dev/hd?
) >& output.txt
from the text console after booting with failsafe -3 produced an empty (0byte) file.