Thanks to all that contributed here. The system was saved using the rescue cd and the method below. Matthew, you were right, it wasn't easy, but it was worth the time. I booted with the rescue cd and selected Rescue existing installation. Thanks to Itamar for the root= option on rpm. I followed Michael's advice not to use the force option - thanks Michael. I figured that my best bet was to get yum up and running since it would take care of dependencies for me so I spent a long time getting all the right dependency packages in my list for the command below: rpm -Uvh --root=/mnt/sysimage http://.../yum...rpm [dependency package list] Once yum was good I did: chroot /mnt/sysimage and from there I went down my list using yum until all 311 packages were restored. I had to edit the grub.conf file as the new kernel wasn't the same as the old, but with that done the system booted and all is well. Thanks again.
