Linux

32.5    Direct Access to the Contents of an Image File

This section is about how you can read or modify the contents of a virtual disk without starting the virtual machine itself. This is useful, for example, when you want to perform repairs from the outside or modify configuration files by means of a script.

There are different procedures for accessing the virtual disk:

• You can read or modify the contents of the virtual disks directly in the host system.

• You can make use of various libguestfs tools.

• You can use a Linux live system to help you—that is, start the virtual machine from the ISO image of a Linux distribution and access the virtual hard disks from there.

In this section, I will only discuss the first and second variants. Some ...