Hello everyone! I hope to be posting in the correct place, if not please tell me and I’ll delete this. I have a W11 VM on my EndeavourOS KDE laptop that I use because of some software I need for university that does not run under wine (LabVIEW and Keil uVision). The VM is running on virt-manager (QEMU KVM) using the virtio drivers, and it works really well (I mean, to be windows). The only problem is that today I run a windows update and… sbem, BSOD after reboot. The automatic diagnostic fails to do anything, uninstalling updates fails, of all possible recovery options the only one that does “something” is the command prompt, that I have 0 experience using. This was the first time updating since I created the VM a few weeks ago. Now my question is: is this fixable? Is there at least a way to recover my files, perhaps using the cmd? Thanks in advance to everyone!
You can boot the VM from a liveCD ISO and then mount the drives to extract files (share a USB storage device to easily get them off). You could also add a second virtual disk, put an NTFS partition on it (within the VM) and copy to that if you plan to rebuild the OS drive.
If you need the offsets of the partitions you could also mount them from the disk image directly via a loopback device, but that’s a bit more complicated.
When dealing with Windows either on bare metal or VMs, I’ve often found it useful to store my more important data on a second disk so that I can easily back it up and it will survive across a wipe+reinstall of the OS.
This is a good life lesson I think XD i’m downloading a live iso as I don’t have one and i’ll boot the vm from there as soon as the download finishes
Thanks for the answer!
But really, try booting a portable version of Windows like it’s a CD or USB in the VM.
It may be just file corruption. Try running
chdsk.exe /f C:in the command prompt. If that doesn’t work, trydism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. Keep your virtual NIC online for the second command, it may try to download updates from MS if local files are corrupt and the WinSxS backups are corrupt as well.Thanks for the answer! The first command says
chdks.exe is not recognized as an internal oe external command, and the second commands saysError: 87 cleanup-image option is unknown
Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.
How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.
Do you have an earlier snapshot that you can roll back to? If not then this is a learning experience about how you should take a snapshot before doing any configuration changes/updates. And also maybe some automatic ones on a schedule (daily/weekly).
As far as recovering files, you could try the Windows recovery environment (or whatever they call it). Take a snapshot first, in case it makes things worse.
You could also try mounting the virtual disk to your host system. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mount-qcow2-image
Or try booting the VM with a live boot environment of your favorite distro, similar to how you would do recovery from a dead physical machine.
I don’t have any, I didn’t think it was necessary to just run 2 softwares… But I was wrong :(
And also maybe some automatic ones on a schedule (daily/weekly)
Don’t Windows do it automatically? I though it was more stable than this :/
Or try booting the VM with a live boot environment of your favorite distro, similar to how you would do recovery from a dead physical machine.
I’ll try this as soon as I can, thanks for the help! I’ll post here any news
My least favorite thing about Windows, above all things, is that it’s extremely difficult to discover what’s wrong with it. People just try random things until it works in most cases.
