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I'm trying to get Xenserver 5.5 running on a spare computer here, hardware specs:

Intel Q6600, 4GB Ram, and Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard

Xenserver itself installs fine onto a 150GB sata hdd, however it fails to boot whatsoever, giving this garbled mess: http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/9918/biosi.jpg it's not frozen because if I press enter it just prints a different garble and it also says "could not find kernel image".

The strangest thing is if I put that hdd in my desktop and assign it to a VMWare desktop vm (under the ESX profile no less) it boots perfectly... leading me to believe there are no problems with the install or the hdd itself.

From what I can tell the error seems to be occuring completely seperately to Xenserver, in the bootloader extlinux?. If there was a motherboard compatibility issue I would think it would also have manifested during installation, and the fact the problem seems to be with the booting into Xen makes me doubt this.

Any ideas guys?

(I'm using Xen because it can do PCI passthrough without VT-d.)

2 Answers 2

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Yes, it seems that your boot-loader is unable to get the kernel up and running.

Did you install it using VMWare or did you install it using the actual hardware setup? If you did the former, that might explain it because your hardware setup is probably different from the VMWare virtual hardware.

On another note, do not confuse Xen with XenServer. XenServer is a custom commercial product. You may find it difficult to do PCI pass-through.

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  • I have attemped installs both using the real hardware and in VMWare with the physical disk assigned, both give the same result.
    – Adrian
    Mar 6, 2010 at 12:12
  • Since July 2013, XenServer is an open-source project. Citrix released it under an open-source license and, as often happens in similar scenarios, provides "commercial support" for it. But despite such commercial support, "Xen Server" still remains a fully open-source project. As for "PCI passtrough", even tough I haven't tried it directly, there are succesfull case histories at least with Xen Server 6.5 Aug 13, 2015 at 20:36
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You just need to install PvGRUB for you to be able to boot the kernel inside your domU. I'm not sure though if the version of your XenServer supports it.

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