# grub doesnt allow to boot xen from ext4 partition

## nivw

After a week of testing I can report that one MUST have a separate partition for /boot using ext2 or 3 in order to boot xen.

It seems a grub issue in 0.97-r10 and 1.98

both versions of grub complain that the booting file system is faulty, although fsck -f doesnt find any issues. and I can but fine of the disk using the same kernel (2.6.34-xen and 2.6.39) when xen is not enabled.

this issue should appear in the gentoo xen manual.

here is the grub 0.97 msg:

  Filesystem type is ext3fs, partition type 0x83

 kernel /boot/xen.gz

      [Multiboot-elf, <0x100000:0x18ea18:0x435e8>, shtab=0x2d2078, entry=0x100000]

 module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.34-xen-r4-dom0 root=/dev/sda1

 Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure

 Press any key to continue

in grub 1.98 I get:

invalid magic number

after splitting my partition to allow 100Mb in the start of the 500Gb disk for /boot and formating it ext3, using the same grub and kernel - all works well

Niv Waizer

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## Hu

GRUB legacy does not support reading ext4 volumes.  Some distributions carry a patch to make it work.  I thought I had read that grub2 could read ext4, but your experience contradicts that.

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## Aquous

I have my / on ext4 with no seperate /boot partition and my grub (legacy) boots my (non-Xen-)kernels fine.

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