To modprobe or not to modprobe? That's the quesion. Udev has many advantages, for instance not loading unneccesary drivers - quick startup times and reduced power consumption. That is why I've recently updated my gentoo installation's initrd to support udev. But - for the recovery console I'll stick with iterating through the kernel modules and modprobe-ing them one by one. This ensures that *all* hardware is recognized properly before we hand the system over to the user - so that there's no need to manally modprobe drivers from then on. There's nothing more frustrating than to boot into a recovery shell and to be missing important kernel modules.