I occasionally crash my 2Gb SD Chip Knoppix 6.2.1 installation doing things
beyond my competence. Knoppix gives one root privileges that one may not
always deserve.

Unfortunately, if a crippled 'Knoppix from Flash' system survives enough to
re-write a 'persistent store' on shut-down, then it's highly likely the next
boot-up won't be successful, since the crippled system will have replaced an
earlier, presumably healthy boot image. At which point you may not only have
lost all the tweaks you have added, you may not even have a bootable system.

Sometimes you may know when the system has been crippled, just by the way it
is behaving. In such cases, perhaps you can preserve what you have by not
even attempting a normal shut-down. Best in this case that rather than try
a normal shut-down, to instead yank your SD chip or USB, and do a power-down
and hope your earlier copy of Knoppix is still ok.

It would be nice if, in Knoppix's process of preparing a 'persistent store'
on normal shut-down, that some sanity checks would first be applied to
determine whether to revise an originally-booted image or not. If, for
example, the new image would be larger than the SD or USB device, then it
won't be useful to replace the earlier image. There may be other useful,
less crude checks, but I'd settle even for just this one, which I don't
think is there now.