With hijack, you can also log in using ftp (or even http) and download /dev/hda5 to you PC. To go back to your installation, just re-upload it to the empeg after installing hijack again.

Yah that's what I was going to do, but it still takes a lot of time. The idea of booting from a second root partition living on hda2 is a really neat idea and I hope that evolves into an "Empeg Standard Development Environment" with all the cool debian tools and stuff already pre-loaded into the image file. As long as we can agree on what to put in there.