[phugoid]

I might have misunderstood the story, but if this happened to me today on my gear I would simply turn it all off, connect that half-erased hard disk to another machine, mount it, and pull all the data off. And only after a lot of googling to see if some of the lost files could be "undeleted".

Salvaging the disk by recreating a minimalist system on it is heroic and hacky, but was that the only way?

[jodrellblank]

When the story mentions "Alternatively, we could get the boot tape out and rebuild the root filesystem" and "VAX", then "a lot of Googling" was out of the question.

I'm too young for the VAX era, but was there "a" hard disk which could be easily swapped and if they had another (which the Ethernet comment suggests they did) then would it have spare connectors? and free disk space? How fast did files copy back then?

If so they'd still be faced with shutting both down (knowing they couldn't start this one up again, and what was the procedure for shutting down / starting the other?) then be without both while they concocted a bodge recovery, then be faced with telling everyone to use the other and how to find their work - assuming if could take that many extra users and they had enough terminals for that.

That's sounding like a day's downtime of two systems and several days of people disruption followed by more disruption when they had to move users back.