When you start to work with AIX systems you should have. It makes a lot of things a lot easier.

I will try to explain a few things which will probably clear it up a bit for you:

A "savevg" image is the image of a volume group (VG) in backup format. the "savevg" command is basically a wrapper for "backup" with some marginal additional logic.

A "mksysb" image is the same, but especially for the rootvg. It consists of a "savevg rootvg", but - this sets "savevg" and "mksysb" apart - with additional information needed to boot and restore a system. As all the configuration information for a system rests in the rootvg this makes perfect sense.

To keep things simple: there is boot information attached along with a boot block (i skip the more esoteric parts of a mksysb here). If you take such a mksysb to a DVD or tape you could boot from these and restore a complete system along with all the customization and other system information. Unfortunately, if you take a mksysb to a file the commands built-in logic recognizes this and omits the boot block - which is why you can't boot from it right now.

A NIM server would also take a mksysb image to a file (over the network), but is able to boot the system from its own internal boot block (tftp/bootp) and then use the mksysb image to further restore the system. This is why it is wise to have such a NIM server (another reason is software management, update management, easy installation from a central source, ....).

What you could do now is the same the NIM server does automatically for you, but by hand: use the service disk to boot into a maintenance shell and use the mksysb image to restore the system. There will be no nfs at this stage of course, but you could burn the image to a DVD and use this to install.

This may work. Don't forget to change the bootinfo on the disk once you have restored it and change the bootlist of your system to use the restored disk instead of the one you used to restore it. See the man pages of the "bootinfo" and "bootlist" commands.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

PS: you might want to read a (very short) introduction to NIM concepts in the pinned thread at the top of this forum.