[Fedora-xen] Where's my VM gone?

[Evan Lavelle]

I'm on F8, and decided to have a go a creating a PV guest on LVM (x86_64 
F8 DomU on x86_64 F8 Dom0) using virt-install. virt-manager doesn't 
appear to do anything on my (out-of-the-box) F8 Dom0; you just enter a 
root password, and the GUI disappears. I've already done a couple of 
other guests 'manually' on this DomU, without problems.

It took me a few hours to get through installation, because of various 
problems with NFS firewalls, DNS problems, and so on. I had to abort the 
install several times. when this happened, my previous VM name was 'used 
up'. xm list showed a zombie domain with that name, even if the 
installation had barely started. I couldn't start a new installation 
with the same name, because virt-install complained that the VM already 
existed.

So, I Googled around, found others with the same problem, and found out 
that I could remove the zombie entry with 'virsh undefine'. I eventually 
created a VM with the correct name, which ran Ok, and shut down the machine.

This morning I turned on the box, did an 'xm list', and found what 
appeared to be a zombie with the new VM name (no ID, no status; just a 
name). So, I virsh undefined it.

This seems to have been a big mistake. I then discovered that 
virt-install doesn't create a config file, and there was nothing in 
/var/lib/xend/domains, presumably because of the undefine (none of this 
is documented in Fedora7VirtQuickStart, by the way).

How do I get my VM back? Is there some way to get the XML config back? 
If not, is my only option to manually make an /etc/xen config file? 
There's a little bit of information in xend.log which I could use for 
the config file.

Finally, I'm (very) confused about what exactly is 'Xen' and what 
exactly is 'Fedora'. You seem to have done various things which I'm 
guessing are Fedora-specific, but which don't seem to be documented 
(I've had a lot of trouble with /etc/inittab, for example). Is this 
documented somewhere? And am I going to run into any problems if I 
convert a virt-install domain back to plain-old-Xen?

Thanks -

Evan