I'm not that familiar with the relevant systems, but this was before plug-and-play was a thing, and moving drives around wasn't a minor operation. Mario mention

I'm not that familiar with the relevant systems, but this was before plug-and-play was a thing, and moving drives around wasn't a minor operation. Mario mentions a similar option in the article: "Another solution might be to borrow a disk from another VAX, boot off that, and tidy up later, but that would have entailed calling the DEC engineer out, at the very least. "