Catastrophic recovery is necessary whenever your environment and/or database have been lost or corrupted due to a system failure (disk failure, for example). Catastrophic recovery is also required if normal recovery fails for any reason.
In order to perform catastrophic recovery, you must have a full back up of your databases. You will use this backup to restore your database. See Performing Backups for information on running back ups.
To perform catastrophic recovery:
Shut down your application.
Delete the contents of your environment home directory (the one that experienced a catastrophic failure), if there is anything there.
Copy your most recent full backup into your environment home directory.
If you are using a backup utility that runs incremental backups of your environment directory, copy any log files generated since the time of your last full backup. Be sure to restore all log files in the order that they were written. The order is important because it is possible the same log file appears in multiple archives, and you want to run recovery using the most recent version of each log file.
Open the environment as normal. JE's normal recovery will run, which will bring your database to a consistent state relative to the changed data found in your log files.
You are now done restoring your database.