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)

  • Synthead@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    My least favorite thing about Windows, above all things, is that it’s extremely difficult to discover what’s wrong with it. People just try random things until it works in most cases.

  • Astaroth@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.

     

    How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.

  • rImITywR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Do you have an earlier snapshot that you can roll back to? If not then this is a learning experience about how you should take a snapshot before doing any configuration changes/updates. And also maybe some automatic ones on a schedule (daily/weekly).

    As far as recovering files, you could try the Windows recovery environment (or whatever they call it). Take a snapshot first, in case it makes things worse.

    You could also try mounting the virtual disk to your host system. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mount-qcow2-image

    Or try booting the VM with a live boot environment of your favorite distro, similar to how you would do recovery from a dead physical machine.

    • tubbadu@lemmy.kde.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t have any, I didn’t think it was necessary to just run 2 softwares… But I was wrong :(

      And also maybe some automatic ones on a schedule (daily/weekly)

      Don’t Windows do it automatically? I though it was more stable than this :/

      Or try booting the VM with a live boot environment of your favorite distro, similar to how you would do recovery from a dead physical machine.

      I’ll try this as soon as I can, thanks for the help! I’ll post here any news