After installing a Xen Lenny on a Xen 5.5 host, the boot-process failed with the following error:

08.07.2009 15:55:47 Error: Starting VM 'vmname' - The bootloader for this VM returned an error -- did the VM installation succeed?  Error from bootloader: Return code: 1; Log = Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pygrub", line 719, in ?
    raise RuntimeError, "Unable to find partition containing kernel"
RuntimeError: Unable to find partition containing kernel

Cause of this error was, that I changed the root filesystem from ext3 to xfs during setup, which is the better choise for databases with large tables. But obiously Xen doesnt like that.

During a boot of a xen debian template you can see the following output:

Configuring network interfaces...Starting portmap daemon....
portmap: server localhost not responding, timed out
RPC: failed to contact portmap (errno -5).

If you press CTRL-D to cancel the portmap startup the loopback interfaces does not come up and several other services will not come up. I've been searching for the error for a long time but finally I found the wrong configuration. If you take a close look at the network configuration file at /etc/network/interfaces you will see the following startup order:

auto eth0 lo

This is wrong. Change the order to:

auto lo eth0

Now the system will bring up the interfaces in the proper order.

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