SCO

awesome ! thanks for the help!
bill

I also (think I) remember that, when booting from CD/DVD or floppy, the kernel creates a device node 'hd0root' to point to any hard disk root filesystem. Therefore to take a look around from CD booted maintenance mode you can:

Code:

 
 # mount /dev/hd0root /mnt
 # cd /mnt
 # ls

Obviously to umount that you would:

Code:

 
 # cd /
 # umount /dev/hd0root  (or # umount /mnt)

Without hd0root mounted (of course) you can:

Code:

# fsck -n /dev/hd0root

to see any damage to the hd root filesystem.

Hope that helps.

The likelihood of successfully booting from a diskette is very low. I went through this process recently, and was unable to create a btld diskette for 5.0.5. I ended up calling one of the diskette manufacturers and their tech people told be that the life expectancy of a diskette is less than 10 years, and that they stopped manufacturing diskettes more than 10 years ago.
SCSI disks have a write protect jumper.
What I would do, write protect your boot disk, change the scsi id from 0 to 1, get a new/reconditioned disk scsi 0, and do a fresh install on it, Go through the process of adding the original disk as a second disk, and copy the data to the new drive.
When adding the second disk, do not create any new files ystems, and rename the divisions so that they do not conflict with the divisions on drive 0 that have the same names.

I would buy 2 drives, one to load the new OS and the second to create a duplicate after everything is cleaned up so this doesn't happen again.

Fortunately I haven't had to do this in probably 10 years but JGT's suggested way works well. I simplify things for recovery by keeping the boot drive clean and putting data/programs on a separate drive and use another drive as the destination for backups.

trying to replace diskette with cd rom drive to try use cd - system does recognize new cd rom dirve when booting - not sure which cd I should be trying to use - do not have maintence disk do have install cd - which cd do I need to get to maintence menu
need help not sure where to turn - guys used 10 yrs ago retried on dead!

Do you have any working floppy media? The installation CD media usually has images of the first few floppy disks (1.44MB) on the CD. Put the media in a Windows machine and take a look.

Also, I recall that, when at the install screens, at one point you can hit F8 and select "Shell escape" but, unfortunately, it isn't a very powerfull shell and very few commands; although 'mount' is available.

The best route is probably that suggested by jgt and do a fresh install onto a spare HDD and then mounting your current disk as a secondary drive. Then you will be able to 'fsck' it, etc.