Hi,
a) AIX 5.2 does not virtualize the same way AIX 5.3 can (no virtual ethernet, no microparititions). The product you needed for that is vWPAR 5.2 - and, as the AIX 5.3 version is rumored to be withdrawn from marketing soon - I am going to guess the vWPAR 5.2 version is already withdrawn.
b) make an mksysb image asap to a file, do not worry about it being bootable or not. Just make sure you have the image.
More to come - my ride has arrived.
So, a day later... continuing as promised.
c) to test your DVD making process - years ago (AIX 5.3 ML05 days) I wrote a short article on how to create a bootable DVD/CD (CD will work in this case) - so that you could then read and install an mksysb file from a second DVD. This was a problem I was having when moving things from some old P43-140 systems to a POWER4. If I recall correctly, the process describes (see
http://www.rootvg.net/content/view/134/88/) how a previously captured "mksysb" file can be used as input to the mkDVD process. The mksysb image created was the minimum needed to create a bootable disk.
Largely I gave up on mkDVD as a workable backup method (running the command "live" means you need to have 3X space - the actual system, the temp mksysb file it makes, and then the iso9660 file(s) it creates. One thing I learned to not do is let mkDVD write directly to the DVD (although that is probably not what you have - my POWER4 had a DVD/RAM device, soI could also use the -U option (write as UDF format to the RAM-DVD (special kind of RW-DVD media). (basically, it was so horrendously slow I always wrote to files, transferred them to a PC and burned the DVD on my PC).
So, hoping your system is still alive enough for you to make an mksysb image - I also highly recommend backing up as many non-OS related files (i.e., your real data) in a tar file - so it is easily readable on various platforms.
If you have access to any AIX 5.3 media - this should accept most applications supported on AIX 5.2 - then you could try the process of migrating your applicaitons to AIX 5.3 - and then run that on vWPAR for AIX 5.3.
Hope this helps!