> 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