Here's the problem. We perform full tar backups of our CentOS 4/5 machines in real-time at regular intervals. And when a disaster happens, we are able to restore those backups onto virgin filesystems, make the /dev/null, /dev/zero and /dev/console devices .. and boot the machine.

This has worked well on standalone systems, and also on Xen 3.0.3 guests on CentOS 4.4 machines, where each guest filesystem resides on regular (Xen-host) real filesystem.

But there's no way we've been able to make it work for CentOS 5 Beta guests on CentOS 5 Beta Xen hosts, where each guest disk resides in a file.

The strategy goes something like:

* losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 /XenGuests/Guest1 * mkfs -t ext3 /dev/loop0 * mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0 /mnt * cd /mnt && tar xjpf /tmp/Guest1.tbz * for i in console null zero; do /sbin/MAKEDEV -d /mnt -x $i; done * cd /tmp; umount /srv/vm1; losetup -d /dev/loop0 * xm create -c Guest1

And it always gets most of the way through .. then the guest dies.

Ideas anyone .. please?