The problem:
A vbox virtual machine had failed to start. It was not recovering itself and was in an environment where the vbox image was being run headless.
The data needed recovering so we needed to mount the vdi virtual disk file.
Mounting The VDI Disk File
The first step was to convert it to a raw image:
VBoxManage clonehd --format RAW my-virtual-drive.vdi my-virtual-driveimgMount this:
mount -o loop,rw ./my-virtual-drive.img /mnt/<somefoldername>
For me this failed,telling me, ‘mount: unknown filesystem type ‘LVM2_member’
Mine was an LVM volume but yours might be unknown file type.
If this is not an LVM volume ( unknown file type) then:
You will need to mount it with an offset as it likely contains more than one partition.
fdisk -l ./my-virtual-drive.img
Should tell you something similar to:
Disk /dev/loop1: 19.77 GiB, 21223178240 bytes, 41451520 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 4F198AE2-A256-4319-AFB7-B5684BD97A50
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/loop1p1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot
/dev/loop1p2 4096 3676159 3672064 1.8G Linux filesystem
/dev/loop1p3 3676160 41449471 37773312 18G Linux filesystem
If this is the case add in an offset to your mount command.
mount -o loop,rw,offset=<Sectors * start> ./my-virtual-drive.img /mnt/<somefoldername>
In this case sectors are 512 abd start is 3676160 so
mount -o loop,rw,offset=1882193920 ./my-virtual-drive.img /mnt/<somefoldername>
You should now be able to see files at /mnt/<somefoldername>
If this is an LVM Image
losetup /dev/loop0 my-virtual-drive.img
ls /dev/mapper
will give you the name of the mapped volume ( ubuntu-vg in my case )
vchange -ay ubuntu-vg ls /dev/ubuntu-vg/
will tell you the name of the volume ( ubuntu-lv in my case)
mount /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv /mnt
Please note – making a sub folder of /mnt and mounting to that will fail. That is a folder where as /mnt/ is not a ‘folder’ but a mount point able to handle the volume / group we are mounting.
ls /mnt showed me the disk I had just mounted.
To clean up.
umount /mnt losetup -d my-virtual-drive.img
Image From : https://unsplash.com/photos/businessman-looking-at-growth-chart-with-magnifying-glass-7BxTIzHTfiU
