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I have a KVM server and one of my guest machine is crashed and prompting form fsck check. Now I dont have console access or dont have the root access of the guest VM.

Is there any way that I can run the fsck from the hypervisor ?

I use centos 6.1 as my hypervisor

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3 Answers 3

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install libguestfs:

# yum install libguestfs-tools

use guestfish to open the disk image:

# guestfish -a /path/to/diskimage.img

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: 'help' for help on commands
      'man' to read the manual
      'quit' to quit the shell   
<fs> run
<fs> list-filesystems
/dev/vda1: ext4
/dev/system/lv_root: ext4
/dev/system/lv_swap: swap

and fsck the problematic filesystem:

<fs> fsck /dev/system/lv_root
fsck should have 2 parameter(s)
type 'help fsck' for help on fsck
<fs> fsck  ext4 /dev/system/lv_root
...

good luck!

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  • +1 looks like an interesting set of tools to try out
    – Coops
    Apr 17, 2012 at 13:55
  • Broken in debian7 for me.
    – sjas
    Jun 19, 2015 at 13:55
  • This looked promising, but unfortunately I get the following error at the time I type "run": libguestfs: error: /usr/bin/supermin exited with error status 1.. This is happening using Ubuntu 16.04.
    – user30747
    Oct 17, 2016 at 15:39
  • when I typed "run" I got the error "libvirt: XML-RPC error : Failed to connect socket to '/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock': No such file or directory..." but that was fixed by finding that libvirtd was not running. After "systemctl start libvirtd" it worked. Thanks @mrc
    – sdjuan
    Sep 10, 2019 at 5:12
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You might be able to mount the file on the loopback interface and fsck it. From the site www.ingent.net/en/tag/kvm/ , use:

losetup -f
/dev/loop0

...to see that loop0 here is the next free device, then assign the disk image to that point.

losetup /dev/loop0 disk.raw

kpartx is used to create devices to access it.

kpartx -av /dev/loop0

Then you should be able to use fsck.

fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p2

...and so on. The page is about converting systems to run on KVM, but this part cited above may put you on track to do an fsck repair; I'd add the caution that you should do this with a copy of your image file instead of the base image file, just in case something goes wrong.

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  • This will only work on raw images, not qcow2
    – dyasny
    Apr 17, 2012 at 12:48
  • Long shot, the image could be converted to raw, fsck'd, then converted back. Roundabout, but could work.
    – Bart Silverstrim
    Apr 17, 2012 at 12:54
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    might take days, if the image is large and/or is on a slow lun
    – dyasny
    Apr 17, 2012 at 16:28
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    shrug if it works when other options fail...it's still something that could be tried.
    – Bart Silverstrim
    Apr 17, 2012 at 16:44
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    to complete the answer: when finished with repairing, the partition mapping and loop device can be removed like this: sync; kpartx -dv /dev/loop0; losetup -d /dev/loop0
    – maxschlepzig
    Mar 17, 2016 at 22:19
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Besides what Bart Silverstrim suggested, I can see two ways:

  1. use libguestfs to mount and manipulate the images
  2. boot the VM with a liveCD ISO attached, and either reset the fsck flag or run it using the liveCD
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