[tlug] Favorite USB rescue utility?

[kts <kts@example.com>]

A little Grub or hard disk error causing my Debian system to fail boot:

kernel panic not syncing attempted to kill init 

Needed two hard reboots when the terminal froze after my home drive ran out of free disk space, and now the system is not booting. 
I believe this error indicates the system can’t find files necessary for booting up. Seems I need to make a boot utility to check filesystems, etc. and generally get poking around when I get back to the keyboard this weekend.

Any recommendations for a particular utility? 

Planning to burn it to a 4gb USB stick.

Regards,
Kevin Sullivan

kts@example.com
US: +17857273173
EU: +37254728541