I'm running Slackware 12.0 and followed the directions in the README file in the Xen source tree. I installed grub and made sure it was working properly. Then I rebooted and selected my Xen kernel. But Xen boots to a certain point and then emits an error and reboots. From what I can see, the error is "no /sbin/init found or not mounted".
I suspected that this might be due to a lack of SCSI/SATA drivers in the Xen kernel....so I followed the README instructions to build a custom kernel. I made sure that ALL of the SATA/SCSI drivers are built-in so there should be no need for initrd, but after running make linux-2.6-xen-install, some stuff is installed to boot, but NOT the
xen-3.2.0.gz that grub needs to load. Can you offer any advice?
Requires Free Membership to View
When you register, my team of editors will also send you the latest expert resources covering all areas of server virtualization, such as platforms, architectures and strategies, server hardware, managing virtual environments, application issues and more.
Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director
The first thing to do is to look at the Xen logs which should be in /var/lib/logs (I am doing this from memory so not sure of exact path, but it's definitely in /var). The log should tell you where it stops working. I doubt that it's due to lack of drivers; I would expect it's not finding the right kernel file due to a mistake in the Xenconfig file or in the grub entry.
This was first published in February 2008