backing up and restoring /vrm

[Mark J. Horn]

Hello,

I am a fairly experienced System Admin under SystemV, 4.3BSD and Ultrix 4.1.
Thus I felt pretty confident when a fellow worker (who uses an IBM RT/115
running AIX 2.2.1) came to me and asked me to help him back up his old disk
and move its contents to his new larger disk.  Oh what a fool I was...

Here's the situation.  The manuals give a fairly good description of how to
make a backup of the /vrm minidisk, but they give no description (that I can
find) of how to restore the thing?  Anyone know how this task is accomplished?

To further complicate the problem, the description given in the manuals of
how to backup the /vrm did not work.  Here's what I tried:

I did the following in maintenance mode:

# cvid /dev/fd0
cvid could not open the vrm history file for read.
#

So I left maintenance mode, and tried it again.

# cvid /dev/fd0
   -
	Insert a formatted diskett into diskettte
	drive "/dev/fd0", then press Enter.

   -    The system is now copying the VRM file system.
	This may take several minutes.

[ ...!!SEVERAL!! minutes later... ]

mv: cannot access /vrmmnt/vrinst.0050.00
Abort - core dumped
#

I am trying very hard to backup and restore this person's system, but
am encountering incredible difficulties!  I simply want to copy the entire
contents of the older disk to the newer disk.  HOW DO I DO IT!  I've managed
to build the new disk with its own copy of /vrm.  I can even boot from it, but
the new disk doesn't have the old data AND the old software packages that were 
installed which updated the /vrm.  I've tried every variation of backup(1) and
restore(1) that I could figure to get my version of vrm onto that new disk,
but restore just will not do it.  Any ideas?

Since I am not a regular to this newsgroup, I would appreciate it if you would
direct all replies to the following e-mail address:
	mark.horn at mail.admin.wisc.edu

Thanks,
- sparkie
-- 
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/ __\| . \/ . \| . \| |/ /|_|| _ |	sparkie at picard.cs.wisc.edu
\__ \| __/|   || _ /|   < | || _[		 - or -
\___/|_|  |_|_||_|\\|_|\_\|_||___|	harier!sparkie at cs.wisc.edu