Xen error "could not find any free loop device"

On one of my Xen systems, I added a disk to a VM, but when I attempted to start the machine, it threw up an error:

could not find any free loop device

With a little help fron Google, I found a solution.

Normally, I run m VMs in LVM because they are faster to create, easier to resize, and perform better. In this case, the VM had to be an image file for easy conversion from Xen to ESX. There were four VMs with two disks each. That's 8 disk total. (Yes, I realize you can count, but that number is important.

Turns out that each image file uses a loop device, as if mounting an ISO file. By default there are only 8 /dev/loop's. (See, I told you it was important.) Here's how we add more:

ls -l /dev/loop* | wc -l
          8
echo "options loop max_loop=64" >> /etc/modprobe.conf
rmmod loop
modprobe loop
ls -l /dev/loop* | wc -l
          64