I have managed to create a separate boot partition (/boot) mounted on a new image disk /dev/xvdc.

I am using a 2.6.18 kernel with an initrd with option --preload=xenblk.

My problem is when system boots, I get several xen driver errors:

XENBUS: Device with no driver: device/vbd/51712
and then error "cannot mount filesystem /dev/xvdc".

This probably means the xen drivers are not yet loaded before the boot starts.

Did anyone face such a problem before and knows how and if it can be solved?

Thanks!

Are you using pvgrub? I'm not 100% sure pvgrub works with pre-pv kernels.

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I use pv-grub. I don't have any other option in Linode AFAIK. Am I right?

I suspect that a dedicated server seems like the only option.

If you need to run a kernel that old, your options are becoming slim. It might be worth trying a simple test case (one partition, no initrd, works with modern kernel) and then just changing the kernel, to isolate it to one variable.

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I already managed to boot without initrd.

I need to run a Kernel in FIPS mode, which performs checks upon boot, and Red Hat 6 stopped supporting xen with pv-grub.
That's why I'm using CentoOS 5.6.