How to run fsck on guest VMs from KVM

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

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!

+1 looks like an interesting set of tools to try out 

– CoopsApr 17, 2012 at 13:55

Broken in debian7 for me. 

– sjasJun 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. 

– user30747Oct 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 

– sdjuanSep 10, 2019 at 5:1

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.

This will only work on raw images, not qcow2 

– dyasnyApr 17, 2012 at 12:48

Long shot, the image could be converted to raw, fsck’d, then converted back. Roundabout, but could work. 

– Bart SilverstrimApr 17, 2012 at 12:54

might take days, if the image is large and/or is on a slow lun 

– dyasnyApr 17, 2012 at 16:28

shrug if it works when other options fail…it’s still something that could be tried. 

– Bart SilverstrimApr 17, 2012 at 16:44

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

– maxschlepzigMar 17, 2016 at 22:19

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

this source from : https://serverfault.com/questions/380186/how-to-run-fsck-on-guest-vms-from-kvm