How do I mount a qcow2 disk image?

Question

I have a QEMU virtual machine that uses a qcow2 disk image.

How can I mount its filesystem without powering on the virtual machine?

Solution 1

A quick google search turns up the qemu-nbd program, mentioned here. It is part of the qemu-kvm package, so you'll have to install KVM if you aren't using that already. Not sure about any direct GNOME/KDE solutions, if that is what you were looking for. Here is an example for using it:

sudo modprobe nbd
sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 --read-only /path/to/image.qcow2
udisksctl mount -b /dev/nbd0p1

Solution 2

There's also libguestfs, but it's not yet available from official repositories1. There are binaries in libguestfs.org though.

Comments

[RusGraf]

The xmount manual states that only EWF and raw disk images can be used.

[RusGraf]

Looks like qemu-nbd is the best way to go, as long as I remember to modprobe nbd first. qemu-nbd fails silently if this module has not been loaded!

[Jonathon Reinhart]

I wrote a little tool to wrap this up: github.com/JonathonReinhart/qcow2-explore

[Twirrim]

A qcow2 image is not a raw image, and can't be mounted through either of those approaches.

[myrdd]

qemu-nbd is part of the qemu-utils package, so no need to install KVM

[ivo]

I must appreciate this very nice, yet simple and powerful answer. It helped me to resolve my issue in a couple of minutes. Thank you Tim Yates.