John Hayward wrote:
3) For some reason when I booted the xen.gz file as the kernel I got a corrupted file error message. I tried several times to rebuild this
You MUST use FFSv1 for the root filesystem, FFSv2 will give you these errors (I been there too)...
Also note that root filesystem must be "small", 20 GB is small while 100 GB isn't. For some unknown (to me) reasons boot will fail if your / is too large.
Martti