4 - I wonder if a Fedora live CD/ISO has the ability to format
and write to NTFS partitions?
A variation on this option is promising. Here are the steps:
1 - Download a Fedora 16 Live ISO; use ISO uploader to copy it to your
ISO storage.
2 - Make sure you also have a Windows 2003 ISO and virtio-win VFD in
your ISO storage.
3 - Provision a VM with system drive the size you want and OS Windows
Server 2003.
4 - Select your newly provisioned VM and "Run once". Put the CDROM
first in the boot order.
Attach the CD to your Windows 2003 ISO. Attach the floppy to your
virtio-win VFD.
5 - Press F6 when the Windows setup boots; after it loads, press "S" and
load the
Red Hat virtio driver.
6 - Start a Windows installation as normal; create a partition do a
quick NTFS format.
7 - Abort the install as soon as the format finishes.
8 - Stop your VM.
9 - Do "Run Once", putting the CDROM first in the boot order again.
This time attach the
CD to the Fedora 16 Live ISO.
10 - Do something else for several minutes later while that Gnome
picture slowly paints.
11 - When it finally finishes painting that screen picture, launch a
terminal window.
12 - In the terminal window, do the following:
ls /dev | grep vda
13 - You should see files named vda{nn}, where {nn} is a number. The
one you want is probably vda1.
14 - mkdir /greg
mount -t ntfs /dev/vda1 /greg
cd /greg
mkdir /Windows
rm (or rmdir) anything else sitting there.
15 - Stop your VM. Do another "Run once." Attach the Windows 2003 ISO
to your
CDROM and wirtio-win VFD to your floppy.
16 - Press F6 again to load the Red Hat virtio block driver as before.
Do a normal Windows 2003 install; note that this time it will find
a /Windows
directory and prompt to install into another directory. Here is
where you
install into /WINNT.
17 - Use ntbackup to backup and restore the C drive and system state
from the source server
on top of the newly built VM.
- Greg