[Fedora-xen] treating logical volumes as physical drives

[Justin Wickett]

I would like to use a logical volume as a "physical" drive on which I  
can install a fedora operating system. As of now, when I run xenguest- 
installer, it treats the install location that I specified ( which is  
an unformatted logical volume that I had just created ) as a physical  
drive (named "xvda") and allows me to perform a basic install on it.  
When I look at that logical volume, it comes up as a "foreign"  
device, because it contains a /boot directory, and a volume group  
consisting of a  / directory and a swap directory. I was wondering  
how to mimic that effect without using my xenguest-installer program,  
so that when I pop a CD in and the installer starts up, I can specify  
a logical volume and let the installer treat it as a physical drive  
just like the xenguest-installer program does.

I am trying to accomplish this because I was unable to install FC4  
via the xenguest-installer. I had mounted the image as a loopback  
device to /var/ftp/pub and specified the /pub directory in FTP  
server's root folder as my "Installation source", and was greeted by  
an error from my FTP server (vsftpd) saying "550 Failed to change  
directory". When I do the exact same thing except mount the FC6 iso  
instead of the FC4 iso, everything works fine. What could I be doing  
wrong?

If all else fails, I guess I can just specify in my /etc/xen/xm- 
fc4-001 file the kernel and the ramdisk parameters, and install FC4  
on an ext3 formatted logical volume specified as the / directory, and  
thus reuse my existing /boot directory instead of trying to use the  
pygrub bootloader with a new /boot directory. In this case, where  
could I find a compiled xenU kernel and an appropriate initrd image  
for FC4?

Thank you very much and happy new years to all!

Justin Wickett
Duke 2010
http://www.duke.edu/~jyw2