Aspects of the invention provide methods and architectures for enhancing the reliability of computer appliances and reducing the possibilities that human intervention is necessary in the event of a system failure or failure condition. The provided architecture is extensible and provides a generalized framework that is adaptable to many different types of computer appliances. One aspect of the invention provides a boot up redundancy component to ensure that a computer appliance can be appropriately booted. In the described embodiment the appliance hard drive is configured with multiple partitions that can be utilized to boot the appliance thereby reducing the chances that the appliance will not boot. In addition, an architecture is disclosed that comprises one or more resource monitoring components that monitor an associated appliance resource for a failure condition. The resource monitoring components are programmed to attempt to remedy certain failure conditions that they detect. An appliance monitoring service is also provided and is programmed to attempt to remedy failure conditions that are not remedied by one or more of the resource monitoring objects.