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Lost a xen Dom0 the other day temporarily, and when it came back up one of the DomU’s was having issues booting because the label had mysteriously disappeared from the volume.

There used to be the possibility to add ‘single’ or ‘single init=/bin/bash’ to the extras option in the DomU’s configuration file, however this doesn’t work anymore and probably hasn’t since pygrub introduction.

Quick way to force single user mode is to get yourself access to the grub console, using -c when creating the domain:

xm create -c domu

Which will give you the grub boot menu, which you can edit the boot line to your requirements.