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!
EDIT: I managed to get my files back by adding a new CDROM device in the VM with a live xubuntu iso. Then from Windows recovery shit reboot into BIOS and select that device to boot from (in my case CDROM 3), then navigate to the Users/thenameoftheuser folder and backup on a USB or something all the data you need. I’ll try now to fix the windows installation without fearing the loss of my data… Lesson learned, never trust windows neither inside a VM, always better to keep important data in a separate disk (like shared memory) so that in case of VM failure they are safe in a different place
thanks to everyone!!! marking this as solved as my data are safe now, I’ll update if I’ll achieve to fix windows (perhaps by reinstalling)
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!
I achieved to retrieve my files!!! thank you very very very much! Now I can try more “dangerous” way to resurrect it because my data are now safe in my USB drive
Glad it worked for you. Your could also try and of the recovery options after booting from a Windows ISO. I think there are a few things that can do there that aren’t in the boot-failure recovery menus.
If not, then at least your data is safe for a reinstall