les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (05/07/89)
I recently had a hard disk go out on an AT&T 6386 machine but was able to revive it with a low level format. Fortunately I had a tape backup. Unfortunately the tape backup was made with the "FACE" utility running the backup script and even though it was claiming to be a full system backup it didn't back up much of the system (subsequent examination shows that a full system backup only takes files newer than "installdate" and most of the disk was full of things brought in via cpio with the original date from another machine intact). Fortunately, the original copies mostly still exist. However, making the machine operational again involved most of a day stuffing disks since the core pack and tape driver had to be reloaded before even starting the tape restore. Is there a better way? Perhaps making a bootable floppy with the tape driver installed and using volcopy would work. Has anyone done this? Les Mikesell