XenServer 5.6.1 FP1: Mounting a guest VM's hard drive (VDI) on the host
Back story
This is a problem that I ran up against because I was running the host machine as a bare host and all the functionality that I needed was in the guest machine. The purpose of this was to insulate myself from changes in hardware and to be able to easily backup the entire server (the guest) so it could be restored from image. This meant that occasionally I’d need to access files on the guest machine’s “hard drive” but it wasn’t running so methods that require networking were out. TheĀ solution is to mount the guest’s hard drive image on the host to access it like any other partition.