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Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), ISOLINUX, Boot CD

This is really just a quick note for myself to remember what I did to allow me to get the XCP 0.5 installation CD to run on my demo machine.

The problem I had was that I was getting a APIC timer error during the boot process, It suggests to boot using the noapic option, however I had no idea how to change that.

Anyway it took me ages, and I won’t bore you with details.

Extract the files from the iso to a folder.

You will find in that folder structure the following folders

\boot\isolinux

In there is a configuration file called isolinux.cfg, this is what we need to edit.

The isolinux config is set to boot with the default label install, so we need to change either the label entry, booting to another set of boot paramters or just change the paramters under the install label. I went with the later.

LABEL install
    KERNEL mboot.c32
    APPEND /boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=752M noapic acpi_skip_timer_override com1=115200,8n1 console=com1,vga --- /boot/vmlinuz xencons=hvc console=hvc0 console=tty0 --- /install.img

The added paramters are in bold. Ok now I saved this file.

Now to rebuild the bootable iso. For this I used mkisofs (on windows you can download cdrtools that contains this and the necessary cygwin dll)

L:\Software\~freeware\Xen>mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c
boot/isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -iso-level 4 -boot-info-
table L:/Software/~freeware/Xen/XCP-base-0.5

My iso was extracted to L:/Software/~freeware/Xen/XCP-base-0.5, so I created a new iso called bootcd.iso.

And that was that, burnt to a cd and then ran on the computer. Now I need to work at wtf I am doing to actually install xcp. Smile


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