Xen users - Feb 2006 - Boot problems with Xen 3.0 and SATA drives

Hello,

I just tried to install Xen 3.0 on a machine with a nVidia SATA 
controller and a SATA drive.

Like many other people before, which were trying to boot from a SATA 
drive, I got the following kernel panic:

kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root
fs on unknown-block(0,0)

The reason for this is, that the SATA kernel driver are not included 
directly in the kernel, but are defined as modules. This only works, if 
the modules are not on the SATA drive.

To solve the problem, you have to options:

(1) Compile the driver for your SATA drive into the kernel. For me, the 
following line in the kernel config had to be changed from
    CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_NV=m
to
    CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_NV=y

OR:
(2) Make an initrd image with ''mkinitrd'' which contains the
module with
the SATA driver. The modules in this image are then loaded before linux 
tries to mount the root filesystem. I used the following command (with 
debian 3.1):

mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12.6-xen 2.6.12.6-xen

The initrd image must be included in grubs ''menu.lst'' using
the
''module''-statement, not the
''initrd''-statement (!). My entry in menu.lst
looks like this:

title Xen 3.0 / XenLinux 2.6
   root (hd0,0)
   kernel /boot/xen-3.0.gz console=vga
   module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen root=/dev/sda1 ro console=tty0
   module /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12.6-xen


I hope this explanation provides some help for people who become 
desperate because their Xen does not want to boot.

It would be great, if an initrd image would be provided with the binary 
distribution (I used xen-3.0.1-install-x86_64.tgz), so that it would be 
not necessary for everyone owning a SATA drive to compile the kernel 
just to boot Xen.

Cheers,


Immanuel

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