[Fedora-xen] Is my guest hosed?

[Brian Leyton]

I apologize - this is a long story, and I hope I can explain it properly.

I'm somewhat new to Xen, but some time back I managed to get a working
installation going.  I used FC5, and had my guest (also FC5) working fine,
except for some occasional unexplained crashes (but that's a story for
another time).

Yesterday, my guest crashed, and I could not get it to restart.  I rebooted
the host, without success.  I ran a yum update on the host, and then Xen
would not even start.  I tried googling the error messages, and the
indication I got from that was that there was some incompatibility between
the Xen tools and Xen itself (I think this diagnosis turned out to be wrong
- more on that in a bit).

So I decided to try upgrading the host to FC6 (using yum), the theory being
that at least FC6 might have compatible versions of everything together.
When I did this, it complained about an old kernel version (2.6.17) being
incompatible with a couple of packages, so I used RPM and removed this old
kernel (bad move).

So FC6 installed properly, and after realizing that it was booting with the
non-xen-enabled kernel, it now works fine.  I have a feeling that this was
my problem all along.  Wish I had known that before...

In any case, I was able to get Xen started too.  But the guest would not
start up, because the kernel I had deleted was the one that this guest
needed.  I tried changing the .cfg file to point to a newer kernel, but
though the guest would start up, it will not run properly with the newer
kernel.

So I find myself stuck.  I searched but could not find a 2.6.17 xen enabled
kernel anywhere, and I can't figure out how to fix this guest.  It looks
like some automatic yum updating has updated the kernel on the guest as well
(all of the kernel files in /boot are 2.6.19), and I can't find the 2.6.17
in there.  I'm not sure why the updates that took place on the guest would
not have updated everything to run with the 2.6.19 kernel, but it just does
not work.

Anyone have an idea of how I can salvage this guest?

Brian