Michael,
Yes Im doing it by hand and Im not quite sure if booting from the CD would be of any help. I'd rather try to fix the problem and continue upgrading by hand like I always did.
Goodness me, I cannot think why you would need to do it this way..You don't look after many machines I guess?
If you insist, you can boot from CDrom 1, and type 'linux rescue' from there, it will locate you current installation , and mount it in /mnt/sysimage . The binaries for rpm should be available on the runing linux rescue.. So you should be able to do an rpm install of glibc and other things using the intact rpm binaries on the rescue CD.
Note that you need to do some tricks with rpm to tell it where to install packages correctly.
Cheers, Michael
