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I have a QEMU virtual machine that uses a qcow2 disk image.

How can I mount its filesystem without powering on the virtual machine?

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4 Answers

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A quick google search turns up the qemu-nbd program, mentioned here. It is part of the qemu-kvm package, so you'll have to install KVM if you aren't using that already. Not sure about any direct GNOME/KDE solutions, if that is what you were looking for.

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Looks like qemu-nbd is the best way to go, as long as I remember to modprobe nbd first. qemu-nbd fails silently if this module has not been loaded! – ændrük Sep 24 '10 at 16:03
That's unfortunate. You should be able to add nbd to /etc/modules, anyway. – Tim Yates Sep 24 '10 at 16:54
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There's also libguestfs, but it's not yet available from official repositories [1]. There are binaries in http://libguestfs.org/download/binaries/ though.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/667346

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While libguestfs looks really nice, but is heavyweight. It has a ton of dependencies (It recommends up to 55 dependencies, and installs an entire supermin appliance. – Stefan Lasiewski Mar 4 at 5:53
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xmount can make the disk images of some VMs look like a raw disk (which can then be partitioned with losetup, and the partitions mounted). I don't know if it supports qcow2, however.

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The xmount manual states that only EWF and raw disk images can be used. – ændrük Sep 21 '10 at 2:21

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