Thank you very much Konstantin.  Following your suggestion I booted
into the qemu-installed image to start rsync'ing the filesystem to an
USB drive - it dawned on me that starting with the SL-7-x86_64-DVD.iso
I could install the system directly to the USB drive (instead of a
disk image file then rsync it to the USB).  Other than that it took
much longer (overnight in fact), the install went through
uneventfully.  The installed system on USB boots OK with qemu; it
fails when booting physically, requiring some UUID tweaks I suspect
(as you noted).  Nevertheless, the rescue image (2nd in the boot menu)
does boot successfully!!  I will figure out how to fix the UUID later.
So thanks to your suggestion I have a clean system to test build the
AMD catalyst driver.

Cheers
Boryeu

On 7/10/14, Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:23:39PM -0700, Boryeu Mao wrote:
>> I have tested, successfully, the installation of SL 7 alpha DVD to a
>> harddisk image via qemu (under SL 6.5 x86_64 on an HP Pavilion g6
>> laptop).  To test the build of AMD proprietary graphics driver however
>> requires the detection of the gpu hardware, hence the installation
>> onto a physical hard disk, which is something I prefer not to do until
>> later.  For this purpose, one approach is to build a bootable iso out
>> of the virtual harddisk image from qemu - some info on this could be
>> found in the ubuntu community but so far nothing (that I could find)
>> for rhel systems - is this doable?  Perhaps there may be other
>> approaches for testing the build without the installation to the hard
>> disk.
>
>
> If you have a running system (inside a VM, whatever), you can "install" it
> to a physical media (HDD, SSD, USB flash) using "cd /; rsync -avx .
> /mnt/destination_disk".
> (some people frown upon cloning running systems, but I have been doing
> it for years without any problems). Before rsync, you need to fdisk and
> mkfs
> your destination media, after rsync, you need to grub it and adjust
> the UUID values in grub.conf and etc/fstab.
>
>
> --
> Konstantin Olchanski
> Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
> Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
> Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
>