Xen won't boot but vanilla OS 11.0 works fine

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I have just installed the Xen Hypervisor on a new OS 11.0 install.

Due to a partitioning screwup earlier, I have jsut finished reinstalling OS 11.0 on two freshly formatted hard drives.

SDA0 is a 2.7Gb swap partion
SDA1 is 22Gb ext3 partiton mouted as /
SDB0 is a 120Gb ext3 partition mounted as /home

Vanilla OS 11.0 continues to work fine, and the install went without error until I rebooted.

The boot process stops when trying to mount the 120Gb /home partition, claiming that the superblock is bad.

There is very little on that drive just now so I could reformat if that would help, but it continues to run fine with OS 11.0!

Any suggestions?

#2

Hi,

Not sure to understand your problem.

Are you able to boot a non-xen kernel system without problem?
Does the problem reproduces only when booting the system in xen mode?

If the partition used to host the /home fs is damaged, the superblock problem will reproduce in both modes, not only in xen mode.
If superblock issues are preventing the system to start, you have to boot in rescue mode or maintenance mode, and use the right tool to fix it.
Before that, you have to find out what kind of fs is built in the partition mounted on the /home directory.

If not sure about what kind of file system in your home partition, run

cat /etc/fstab

Hope this helps.

Regards.

#3

Hi and thanks!

A little background is probably in order here:

Since I started this thread, I tried some more analysis and was unable to find any problem with the /home partition, so I have to assume that it was a bad install of some sort.

After some thought I removed the 20Gb drive then reinstalled OS 11.0 on the 120Gb drive alone, reformatting it with the default configuration.

This got as far as the runlevel 3 login, the problem now turned out to be the NVidia proprietary driver! >:(

After reverting to the OSS driver I was able to boot Xen fine, only to find out that my CPU was too old to run “full virtualization” (Athlon 1700+) and that this is required to run a Windows OS.

Since my intent is to use the virtual OS to run the few Windows apps that won’t run under either Wine or Mono (Quickbooks Pro being the nastiest example so far) I am reverting to VMware - which DOES work fine with Windows on this machine although it is awkward.

My plan is to migrate the legacy Windows stuff to my oldest hardware while I get the newer 64 bit machines going with Linux/OS equivalents.

Our evaluation is that GNUCash will do everything that we have Quickbooks doing for example, but you don’t just dump an accounting package without a LOT of testing.

Trouble is I can’t afford to shut down my business while I do all that!

We also run some specialized Financial apps which are written by really bad programmers who know the finance end very well, so likely I iwll never manage to migrate completely.

This also means that the time I spend getting things to work depends on other priorities, sometimes the Linus stuff sits for weeks this week I have manged four straight days of working on it and made great progress.

It looks like the set up from The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11 (GNOME) | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials will do what I need, once I manage to get everything installed properly.

THEN I just need to pull the plug on the present WinXP system and start the migration for real.

Ironically the last machine to migrate will likely be the new Vista HP/AMD Quad machine that is giving everyone fits and started this whole migration project.

Part of the problem with it is that it needs stuff that will only run under Win 95(!!) - it won’t even run under “compatibility mode” in Vista.

Anyway thanks again for the help and hopefully I will be able to return the favor to others in the near future.

I am already planning on writing a migration guide of some sort since I am sure that we are not the only people having these problems.

Mike

#4

pearl298 wrote:
> Hi and thanks!
>
> A little background is probably in order here:
>
> Since I started this thread, I tried some more analysis and was unable
> to find any problem with the /home partition, so I have to assume that
> it was a bad install of some sort.
>
> After some thought I removed the 20Gb drive then reinstalled OS 11.0 on
> the 120Gb drive alone, reformatting it with the default configuration.
>
> This got as far as the runlevel 3 login, the problem now turned out to
> be the NVidia proprietary driver! >:(
>
> After reverting to the OSS driver I was able to boot Xen fine, only to
> find out that my CPU was too old to run “full virtualization” (Athlon
> 1700+) and that this is required to run a Windows OS.
>
> Since my intent is to use the virtual OS to run the few Windows apps
> that won’t run under either Wine or Mono (Quickbooks Pro being the
> nastiest example so far) I am reverting to VMware - which DOES work fine
> with Windows on this machine although it is awkward.

Have you looked at VirtualBox? For me, a virtual Windows XP on VB handles my 2
apps that do not run on Linux. One is TurboTax and the other is the app to
program my Logitech universal remote. The latter even uses the host USB system
to communicate with the device. Performance is pretty good. XP is faster than
Vista was running natively on the hardware. With XP running full screen, you
cannot really tell that the machine isn’t running native Windows, and it only
takes 3 clicks to boot the virtual Windows.

Larry

Larry

#5

I haven’t, but I will thank you!