[libvirt-users] Suggestions on building VM disks from scratch

This may not be the best forum to ask, but it does seem to be one where it is as likely as anywhere that someone will have dealt with a similar problem. I need to define a procedure for last resort disaster recovery from an incremental file level backup of the root partition (and any others that are critical.) Now it is easy enough to create a raw virtual disk with dd, then to losetup and do a cfdisk and mkfs, then mount it and rsync the backup onto it. At this point I would like to be able to install grub and make the virtual disk bootable. I have 'issues' with the way grub does things and the way it seems to make certain assumptions for you. The virtual disk is in actuality going to become an hd(0) on the virtual machine; but my past experience with grub is that it is going to assume you really intend to install the MBR on your running system disk; but if you tell it hd(1) then when you try to boot it ain't gonna work. Has anyone dealt with these issues? It's more than just a VM one; I run up against it time and again. A few months ago I attempted to attach a brand new SATA disk via a USB converter to my laptop so I could build a system on it for a machine that has not CD, no floppy, etc, etc. I damn near clobbered my laptop but fortunately caught the problem in time and fixed it before a reboot... in which case I'd have *really* had issues.