Mounting raw and qcow2 VM disk images

Mounting a partition from raw image is pretty simple:

losetup /dev/loop0 image.img
kpartx -a /dev/loop0
mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/image

If kernel parameter (as loop in compiled into Fedora’s kernel) like loop.max_part=63 added it is even simplier:

losetup /dev/loop0 image.img
mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/image

Alternative way is to specify direct offset to partition:

mount image.img /mnt/image -o loop,offset=32256

To mount qcow2 images there is (at least in F-11 qemu) very useful qemu-nbd util. It shares image through kernel network block device protocol and this allows to mount it:

modprobe nbd max_part=63
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 image.img
mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/image

If LVM is present on image it could be initialized with:

vgscan
vgchange -ay
mount /dev/VolGroupName/LogVolName /mnt/image

Finishing is done with (depending on how it was initalized):

umount /mnt/image
vgchange -an VolGroupName
killall qemu-nbd
kpartx -d /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0