[et-mgmt-tools] Manually creating a sparse file

[David Robinson]

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?

A sparse file can be created with dd.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=sparse seek=512 bs=1M count=0
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 4.6e-05 seconds, 0.0 kB/s
# ls -lah sparse
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512M Apr  8 08:47 sparse

Cheers,
Dave