create vm with system storage max size set above physical disk size.
move files from external drive onto that internal drive nearly maxing out physical disk.
power off machine/reboot and try to start the vm
Expected or desired behavior:
For the VM to start.
Actual behavior:
Qube Status: “storage” (or the name of your vm)
Domain “storage” has failed to start: Cannot connect to qrexec agent for 60 seconds, see /var/log/xen/console/guest-storage.log for details
General notes:
I have spent more time than I would like to admit now trying to solve this issue to no avail. I have changed every qube setting there is and have it currently set to 1:1 settings with another VM on my machine that works perfectly fine and always has. I have seen other threads saying to increase ram/initial ram which I have tried along with a few other harmless but also affective-less things like settings the timeout time to 300 seconds instead of 60 which just gave me more of the message I saw in the system log. The system log had hundreds of lines containing pretty identical text to this starting from the start and going all the way to the end never having the log come to a true end and timing out instead I can only presume having to do with this but without further prevail, “ .M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m*.[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (46s / no limit)
.M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (47s / no limit)
.M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (47s / no limit)
.M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (48s / no limit)
.M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m*.[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (48s / no limit)
.M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m* .[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (49s / no limit)
.M
.[K[ .[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m* .[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (49s / no limit)
.M
.[K[.[0;31m*.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m* .[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (50s / no limit)
.M
.[K[.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m* .[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (50s / no limit)
.M
.[K[.[0m.[0;31m* .[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (51s / no limit)
.M
.[K[.[0;1;31m*.[0m.[0;31m* .[0m] A start job is running for Initiali…unt /rw and /home (51s / no limit)”
^above is what I kid you not thousands of lines of the log file I was told to view looked exactly like and how it ended even with the timeout set to 5 minutes it still had the same ending which leads me to believe this is the culprit however I’m
not quite sure what to do with this information other than take it here as the VM in question has very personal documents to me inside that I need recovered one way or another and I’m very lost on how to achieve that so any help at all would be ahold it let amazing!
I have consulted the following relevant [documentation]:
I am aware of the following related, [non-duplicate] issues:
Really would appreciate any and all help with this and recovering my files I do not care about the VM itself more of just the files inside so if there is anyway to access the files without starting the qube that would work too
This was a formal bug report that I reported on the GitHub but it was closed and I was told to post it on here instead for community support so now I am unclear which it is, and how to get the support I need fixing this issue I am having.
Re. your 1st: May or may not be relevant, but why?
Re. your 2nd: How close is “nearly”? And how did you determine this given the other qubes & dom0 involved?
Re. your 3rd: Clarifications, please. Did you shutdown this qube completely before “power off machine”? How did you verify successful shutdown?
If this qube’s (very large) storage is corrupted, boot can take a loooooooooong time to verify the disk… And may not be able to if there isn’t sufficient free space? (Don’t know - never faced this before…)
You have a backup of all this data from before whatever changes were made? It may be simpler to start over…
Not sure if it is relevant either but I figured I would include it as I didn’t have many other things to go off of that I did wrong in my eyes but I thought that could have been one of them. considering downsizing the vms storage before I realized there are risks associated with that, risks I am not willing to take…
It never maxed out entirely but around 1% was left at one point, and I determined this because in the top right a triangular yellow exclamation icon appeared telling me the percentage utilized and the percentage left of my total disk usage.
I apologize, I shutdown the machine in the normal manner via clicking the top right most icon/user icon and pressed it then pressed shutdown on the drop down menu and let the machine power down healthfully.
Not sure at what point the storage would have been corrupted or how I could tell but this may possibly be what happened, it took lots of CPU resources to try and start the cube seemingly idling however. I even took what one user said and increased the timeout time to 300 seconds/5 minutes with no avail as the results were the same. I also compared logs with a healthy boot from another VM on my machine and I did not have the same “A start job is running for initial…” which makes me think something else was bugged that caused this to hang/loop without ever finishing.
This assumption however I wish were true is mistaken lol, this is also why I was so concerned, and what I did ended up being this however since I didn’t have a backup I had to do something else to recover the files from the vm without booting it. I detail that solution in my other post here “How to recover files from a non functional (won't start) Qubes VM” So my files have been successfully recovered at this point however I do appreciate your trying to help me.
