today I accidentally bricked a standaloneVM while trying to update to fedora 44.
it doesn’t even start, it just kernel panics and closes without giving me the opportunity of doing anything. fixing it is out of the question.
as far as I could tell it should be possible to get the data that was on that VM onto another; but I do not know how; I am also not really tech-savvy.
sorry if this is too similar to other questions.
please help.
If you haven’t restarted it a bunch of times, revert: Volume backup and revert — Qubes OS Documentation
In any other case, make a backup first just to be safe.
Not necessarily, if it is not based on a minimal template it probably has distribution kernel installed. You could try selecting distribution kernel instead of the one provided by qubes: Managing qube kernels — Qubes OS Documentation
Or playing with kernelopts if you have a reason to suspect them
But that is if you want to troubleshoot the vm. If you only need data, then it is stored on a logical volume (lvm by default, it can be zfs or btrfs, you know your setup…) associated with your standalone, accessible from dom0. Use appropriate tools (see man lvm, man lvs for lvm, etc.) to find the correct volume. It should be something like vm--yourvmname--voltype with voltype being either private (home folder on standalone, 2 GB by default), or root (/, 20GB by default).
Once you figure out the volume name, you can find it in /dev/mapper/ on dom0. It is a concatenation of volume group and volume name in /dev/mapper/, so something like qubes_dom0--vm--yourvmname--voltype. From there, read it however you want. Start a good vm with this volume attached, for example:
$ qvm-start \
--hddisk=dom0:/dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-vm--yourvmname--voltype working-vm
In working-vm the volume shows up as an unmounted xen block device (something like xvdi).
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I could not revert it as I tried a bunch of things before coming here.
I managed to mount it to another qube and copy everything out of it.
Thanks for your help.
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