I was firing up XenServer 5.5.0 in my lab on my trusty m2n-sli deluxe system – boy has that system been hammered with a variety of tasks since it was built 🙂 Anyway, the install went without incident only to reboot into the freshly installed XenServer system and guess what – reboot loop at the splash screen.
After a small period where I formed bad words I rebooted it again and turned off the splash screen by entering
menu.c32
at the boot prompt, hitting <tab> to go into edit mode and removed the splash/quiet options. Anyway, to cut a long story short I was getting ‘could not find filesystem /dev/root’ followed by a panic and a watchdog reboot. All very annoying.
mount: could not find filesystem ‘/dev/root’
…
…
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
To cut this story even shorter the problem was related to bios settings. In my case the primary (and only) hard disk in this box at the moment is an IDE 120Gb Seagate drive. The fact that it’s IDE wasn’t the problem, the problem was that JMicron RAID was enabled for IDE disks. I’m guessing the installer had no problems with JMicron support, but the actual installed Xen system did. I’m not sure I want to actually delve any further into the reasons why but turning off JMicron RAID for IDE took it out of the picture and the system booted fine.
Happy result
MrPointy's Weblog 