Why did they not boot from installation/recovery media, mount the drive, copy what was left, restore and copy back the user and configuration data that was found?
> Alternatively, we could get the boot tape out and rebuild the root filesystem, but neither James nor Neil had done that before, and we weren't sure that the first thing to happen would be that the whole disk would be re-formatted, losing all our user files. (We take dumps of the user files every Thursday; by Murphy's Law this had to happen on a Wednesday). Another solution might be to borrow a disk from another VAX, boot off that, and tidy up later, but that would have entailed calling the DEC engineer out, at the very least. We had a number of users in the final throes of writing up PhD theses and the loss of a maybe a weeks' work (not to mention the machine down time) was unthinkable.
Yea, I am not buying it. They have a UNIX guru that is building new commands in assembly and transferring the files with uuencoding but no one knows how a recovery tape works? Using a recovery tape was not a rare event in UNIX shops.
