This is an RTFM question, of course one shouldn't try such things when one is
tiring and worse yet one shouldn't submit questions to sun-managers in
the same state.  Immediately after sending the message and shutting down
my Mac, I was rinsing the diapers before going to bed and realized how
silly I was since even not knowing about the -w option to boot and forgetting
about the alternate way to use mount -o remount for a filesystem not
in /etc/fstab, all I had to do was either copy sd0b to any other partition
and create an /etc/fstab entry then boot from the alternate partition.
WARNING:  I haven't tried the above yet,  I will do so later today when
I am back at work, but the real answer to my question is
        boot sd(0,0,1) -sw
which I didn't know about because I boot single user all the time and
/ always comes up rw (because of /etc/fstab being there) so I focussed
inappropriately on this instead of thinking it through. (I just checked
and there is no -w option in the 4.1 man page for boot(8) so I don't
feel so bad, although it is in the install manual.)
All this begs the question "if it is so simple to boot a system from the
miniroot, why does the install manual show all these elaborate procedures
for booting the system as a client off another 4.1.1 system?" I'm glad
I tried to shortcut the procedure because I learned something and saved
myself a little time (and next time LOTS of time).
Thanks to:
        cfoley@arsenic.cray.com (Charles Foley)
        mp@allegra.att.com (Mark Plotnick)
        kevinmac@ll.mit.edu (Kevin McElearney)
        per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland)
and the dozens more I will probably get yet.
Gerald Justice
Unix Systems Manager (in training!)
Phone:     (604) 363-0055  PDT      Fax:    (604) 363-0045    Telex:  049-7295 
Internet:  justice@dao.nrc.ca       Mail:   Dominion Astrophysical Observatory 
                                            National Research Council (Canada) 
BITNET:    justice@nrcdao                   5071 W. Saanich Road 
VAX PSI:   68100434::justice                Victoria, B.C.   CANADA  V8X 4M6
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