Eric: Perhaps you can help. I'm at the point of screaming frustration. First, I had to search for a machine on which I could install guestfish and virt-rescue. None of the production machines were safe for this as the closest I could come was either adding a backports line to an apt sources file on a squeeze machine or upgrading an Ubuntu machine to the not-yet-ready for prime time Precise. I finally realized one machine *was*, for strange hysterical reasons, already on the Precise release. So I selected the package. This took an hour or more because the not ready for prime time Precise wanted to remove diffutils and warned you that you should not. After a bunch of research I figured it would work, because a new one was coming in immediately... and it did. Mostly. It took about a dozen iterations to get everything settled again. Then I created my blank 'disk' file and tried to run virt-rescue on it. It crashed out with an error from febootstrap. After finding nothing terribly useful or current on this in searching, I tried guestfish instead. After some fiddling I got it to attach my blank disk. However I cannot find a reasonable way to partition it with the part-add which seems to want me to count sectors. All I want is a 9G linux and a 2G swap. It also lacks access to rsync. I'd hoped for something like Knoppix for VM's. So, I found the guy's web site in another google search. Wrote up a nice long explanation of what I need to do and what pointers he might have to get up the learning curve on his application or whether there was something better for my purpose... and when I hit the post button, Wordpress asked me to login. I did so. It then put me back on the same page with my long well thought out comment gone. I am trying seriously not to throw my laptop through a window at this point. Really. Have you worked at all with either? You pointed me to them a few days ago, so I'm hoping you have. All I want is to: create a blank disk (dd works fine) put a partition table on it create an X GB root linux partition and a Y GB swap do the mkfs and mkswap rsync a backup image onto the 9GB partition write the mbr from grub so that the disk is a bootable VM. boot it from virsh I've managed through a number of arcane commands to ge as far as the grub problem. Perhaps I can do everything manually and only use guestfish for the last step with the grub. It would be nice if there were a better way to do it. I am sure someone will pipe in "this is the wrong list". After the day I have had on this so far, with dead end after dead end, as Rhett Butler said to Scarlett: "Frankly m'am, I don't give a damn." Any one have some ideas? This really should be something that is easy to do.
