> 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