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