Does your machine have a serial port? If you are building the kernel yourself, you can enable the serial console and connect with a terminal program from another computer, like the cavemen used to. Then get ssh working from there without messing around with moving the drive around.
The machine has a serial port, though I haven't figured out how to enable a TTY on that port. But I got SSH working today, so now I'm focused on other more pressing issues for this machine. But I'll have to revisit the serial port eventually, because that'll be needed in case SSH fails.
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