how to recover from a damaged system disk?

[Jason Heirtzler]

Can someone who understands the boot procedure in AIX 3.1 explain
how you recover from a damaged system disk, or alternatively how
to restore the whole system from a backup tape?  The procedure of
actually restoring the files from tape is pretty straight forward,
but there's some special magic involved in making the system
partitions.   It looks like bosboot or mkboot can make a bootable
disk or tape, but what to do beyond that is pretty confusing.

If you boot from a floppy diskette, does this create a ram disk, or
does this copy something to the paging area and boot from there, like
BSDish unixes do?  Also, what's the significance of the logical volume
named /blv?  Are there any special requirements, like using contigious
physical partitions there or on the root lv?

At the moment, the only choice that I have is to reinstall the entire
system from the distribution tapes and then restore the user partitions
and then work back from there.  With more than a Gigabyte or two, it's
a pretty scary prospect.  Thanks for any light you can shed,

jdh at pub.bu.edu