Mounting a backed up LVM Image

Submitted by cobolt on Wed, 03/14/2012 - 10:40

Is it possible to mount the backed up KVM LVM image? I unziped (gzip -d) it and tried: mount -o loop -t ext3 server /mnt/restore/ but I get:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

I remember doing this with xen backup lvm images on another server and it worked but I can't seem to get it to work with KVM images.

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 03/14/2012 - 15:07

This is a little more tricky, as the KVM backup is a whole disk image, so cannot be mounted directly as a filesystem (unlike Xen).

The fix is to un-compress and then use a command like :

mount -o loop,offset=1048576 /backup/yoursystem.ext3 /mnt/backup

The offset parameter depends on where your root partition starts on the disk, which can vary :-(

Submitted by chriswik on Thu, 03/15/2012 - 02:38 Pro Licensee

guestfish looks awesome, I'll give that a try. Thanks!

Submitted by cobolt on Thu, 03/15/2012 - 06:51

Thanks, guestfish worked great.