In my journey through XenServer lands, I once experienced a change in the UUID of the root partition, which resulted in a failed boot and being dropped into initramfs. Although this solution should have worked just fine, I either didn’t know of it at the time or it wouldn’t work for some reason.
While inside the VM initramfs I also had the pleasure of not having any text editor of sorts: no vi, no vim, no nano. Nothing at all. Even though I found the new UUID through the use of ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/ (and some guesswork), I had no way to edit the grub configuration. So, after some trial and error, I came up with the following:
(initramfs) mount /dev/xvda1 /mnt; cd /mnt
(initramfs) cp grub.cfg grub2.cfg
(initramfs) cat grub2.cfg | sed s///g > grub.cfg
After the proper root partition UUID was set in place, a reboot was all it took to set the machine back up and running.