Restoring Sun with No Configuration Information

You can still get some information from your dump tapes, and with a couple of educated guesses, you can get the system up and running. There are a couple of ways to proceed. If you have another system, and you have some spare disk space, you can start to gather some information while the hardware guy is replacing the disk drive. On the second system, create a directory on a file system that has at least 15 MB free. You probably won't use that much, but a little extra space never hurts.

In a crunch, you could probably get by with 5 MB or less. Let's call the directory /hope (because we hope we can get some information out of this). We are going to use the interactive option to ufsrestore (this option is also in restore under Sun OS, but I will use the Solaris versions here) to extract the vfstab from the dump tape. Use the following commands:
# cd /hope
# ufsrestore -ivf /dev/rmt/0

Verify volume and initialize maps
More messages concerning block size, date of the dump, etc
ufsrestore > cd etc
ufsrestore > add vfstab
Make node ./etc
ufsrestore > extract
Extract requested files You have not read any volumes yet.
Unless you know which volume your file(s) are on you should start \
with the last volume and work toward the first.
Specify next volume #: 1
extract file ./etc/vfstab
Add links
Set directory mode, owner, and times.
set owner/mode for '.'? [yn] n
ufsrestore > quit