Ok at the request of a Kimitsu (:P), I have bought, read, and reviewed the book Chinese Cinderella, all in 5 days!

Ok so it was definately my Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard that blew, causing my comp main comp to die. I bought a new one, and installed it last night, an Asrock P4VT8. It lacks firewire, SPDIF out, and gigabit ethernet that the Asus had, but on the upside, the Via VT8237 controller chip has proper SATA support (the ICH5R does not, it's just a SATA bridge interface). So now I get proper NCQ on my drive. Yay!
By the way, obviously in linux, if your kernel can't mount the root or you kill your kernel (by compiling bad options usually for me hehe :) and can't boot your main machine, you can rescue by using any linux boot disk with chroot.

Assuming it's your root drive that's broken, and it is /dev/sda1 with ext3:

mount -t ext2 -o dev /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
chroot /mnt/sda1

Ok the -o dev option to mount causes it to interpret the special dev files and map them correctly to the appropriate character devices. You then chroot to the root of the mount point, and you have an 'emulated' rescue machine, on your native root file system. Rebuild the kernel, reinstall LILO etc.

By the way, Knoppix works really well as a rescue CD because of it's massive support for hardware!