June 2018 | Dios Kurniawan
To support our clients, my company uses Citrix XenServer hypervisor quite heavily – because it is simple and it works well. But few days ago, the moment I have dreaded for long time eventually happened: one of our servers refused to boot after a power interruption. No error message shown, it simply wouldn’t boot. I couldn’t even get into the configuration screen.
After many days of looking for a solution, the answer was simple: use the XenServer installation CD/DVD media to reinstall or upgrade the existing XenServer. Sounds risky because that means overwriting many existing files, but it works. This is the step-by-step:
- 1. Boot machine with XenServer CD/DVD media, enter the installation screen. Stop at the first welcome screen.
- 2. Type “menu.c32”, don’t press Enter.
- 3. Press Tab when the new screen opens.
- 4. Add “disable-gpt” in the parameter list of mboot.c32.
- 5. Continue with the installation and restart the machine.
This fixes the boot problem while preserving the existing VMs inside. I hope this can be useful for those who may face the same problem.