On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 16:21 -0400, Caetano, Greg wrote: > I would like to manually create a VM sparse file that I can use fdisk to > partition then copy a running root partition into the loopback sparse > file. > > How would I manually generate the proper vm sparse file? virt-install creates a sparse file by default for file-backed guests; if you have qemu-img, that can do the same thing. Or you can use your favorite scripting language as long as it can seek in a file. Here's what that would look like in ruby: File::open("/tmp/s.txt", "w") do |file| file.seek(1024*1024*1024) file.print("\000") end That creates a 1GB sparse file /tmp/s.txt David