386 tape restore

[Leslie Mikesell]

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