UPDATE Need help booting from CD (long description of progress so far)

First of all this is not a complete summary yet. I am still working on
bringing the system back but since I believe I have passed a major hurdle
I want to bring everyone up to date.

This is an old Compaq au500 (or 500au) server running Tru64 4.0e.  It was
shutdown abruptly and crudely (The cord was pulled from the wall) for
external reasons and when I attempted to restart it several disks wouldn't
FSCK.

In trying to bring it up I couldn't get it to a point where I could start
working at rebuilding the system

Several folks suggested >>> boot -fl s  with some also suggesting bcheckrc
as the next step

My problem was that boot -fl s brings the root filesystem up in read only
mode so i couldn't edit the fstab file. bcheckrc normally rsolves that but
also attempts to fsck all the filesystems in the fstab file and remount
them.
The problem with that was the bad disks kept bcheckrc from completing

I knew that with the right options I could use the mount command to
remount / as RW so I could 'fix' the fstab file. My concern was making
sure I had the right option so I didn't make things worse.

Eventually I discovered that bcheckrc is a script and not an executable
and looked at it and saw the command I wanted was "mount -u /" to remount
/ as rw.  Then it was easy to work on the fstab file ( I didn't even worry
about setting the terminal type and VI editor since I'm a dinosaur enough
to be comfortable with ed)

I was able to get to single user mode from the install CD (It eventually
brings up an X based install screen that has a 'Unix Shell' button in the
lower right side but older systems are SLOW getting to that point) but I
was getting stuck getting the memory based OS to see the hard drive to
mount it. by the time the system had come up I had been able to find out
about bcheckrc on a second system we have so I halted the system and went
back to boot fl -s as a starting point.

So now I can see if I can recover these disks (I doubt it) or replace them
and (hopefully) restore from the tape backups.

Anyone have good sources for SCSI disks that are supported in these old
disk towers? Right now I have 1 RZ1DB 9.1 GB disk and 3 RZ1CF 4.3 GB
disks. Can I support anything much more up to date?

Bob Smart ([email protected])