" What puzzles me here is that it mounts the root filesystem, yet doesn't
" find /sbin/init ?

I just put snapshot/20000627-1.5 on my z50 microdrive and discovered
the /sbin/init it has is dynamically linked.  In fact almost all the files
in /sbin and /bin are dynamically linked.  Oops.  I replaced them with the
static versions from the previous snapshot to work around the problem.