using installation tape for disaster recovery

[John Hudson]

In article <9009171852.AA03774 at garnet.berkeley.edu> rusty at GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU (rusty wright) writes:
>I'm trying to reinstall my system from dump 0 tapes using the
>installation tape.  (In case you're wondering why, I tried to install
>Ultrix 4.0 on my MicroVAX II/GPX and found out after it was too late
>that 4.0 won't work on an RD53.)  
>My confusion
>is that only mkfs is provided for initializing the disk, not newfs,
>and it's newfs that installs the boot block, so I don't see how I can
>install the boot block.  Can anybody enlighten me?

This is convered the documentation, System Backup and Restore (in my
version it is on page 3-14).

In summary, after making the proper files in /dev and mounting the disk
(see the sequence in the docs), use 'dd' to copy the boot block to the
disk - 'something like'

# dd if=/vaxboot of=/dev/r*0a conv=sync

where * is your RD53 (probably 'ra').

John Hudson
hudson at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu