With the increased use of virtualization has come the increased use of disk images (.iso, .vmdl, .qcow2, .vdi, etc) and LVM’s logical volumes (LV), as dedicated storage for Virtual Machines (VM). Frequently, when setting up a VM, several partitions are created within these disk images.

So, you end up with a machine (the virtualization host), usually installed across several partitions, one of which contains a filesystem containing a disk image or an LVM physical volume with some logical volumes, which in turn contain some more partitions, maybe containing a simple filesystem, or again containing a LVM or RAID volume, that again contains more partitions, etc. If this reminds you of Inception, then you already realize how hard it might be if you want to access on of those interior partitions directly from the host. However, sometimes you need to do just that, be it for disaster recovery or just plain backups.

This post show the method I successfully used to access such partitions. I had to find this out quickly recently, and couldn’t find any one blog post that covered this steps, so here it comes.

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