HELP!: restoring 'restore' on 386i (OS 4.0.1)

[James Darrell McCauley]

Ready for another 386i sob story?

When doing a restoration of a level 0 dump of the /files partition on a
386i, I run across an interesting problem. When restore, in verbose mode,
reaches the 'restore' binary, it says "extract file
./cluster/sun386.sunos4.0.1/appl/advanced_admin/usr.etc/restore" and dumps
core.  I checked the binary file only to find that it is of size 0 (zero).
Hmmm... now I can't finish restoring.  

This happened once before, and if I'd been smart enough to figure it out
the first time, I would have copied it to another partition.  I've loaded
the OS 3 times already (within the past two days) and it looks like I'm
going to have to do it again. (This time I'll make a copy of the restore
binary.)  

Is there some (unwritten) rule about making a copy of your restore binary,
or is this someone else's botch?  How (il)legal would it be for me to
accept a uuencoded 'restore' via e-mail from a kind soul?

While I've got your attention, I tried to restore my /usr partition, and
restore told me that it warning "Read only" and died. But,  'mount' says:

          /dev/rootg on /usr type 4.2 (rw) 

Does anyone have any pointers on this problem or the previous problem
(other than trade it in for a Sparc)?

Thanks,
Darrell McCauley