What is my best course of action for recovering VMs from a failed host drive?

[Puma7978]

Hi All,

I am new to the platform and was testing some basic functionality. My host drive failed before I had configured backups for any of my VMs unfortunately. The large majority of the data on my VMs is non-critical and I don't mind losing it, but one VM in particular had a lot of configuration files that I'd like to save if possible. I can boot into the machine with a live USB and see the proxmox filesystem drive, and I already used ddrescue on the drive to transfer as much as I could to an .img on a backup hard drive. What is my best course of action from here to recover the VMs from this failed host? If I try reinstalling proxmox on the failed drive, will I (assuming the installation works) be able to recover and use the VM files from the previous installation?

 

[sb-jw]

The basic rule is that the original data carrier should be used as little as possible in such a situation. So if you know exactly which file you need, you should copy exactly that to another one. In your case, you need to copy the virtual hard drive and then paste it back into a fresh PVE. However, it is necessary that the virtual hard drive is complete and intact. You can often mount the virtual hard drive directly without having a new PVE instance. But here too, make a backup copy first and then try it.

 

[Puma7978]

The basic rule is that the original data carrier should be used as little as possible in such a situation. So if you know exactly which file you need, you should copy exactly that to another one. In your case, you need to copy the virtual hard drive and then paste it back into a fresh PVE. However, it is necessary that the virtual hard drive is complete and intact. You can often mount the virtual hard drive directly without having a new PVE instance. But here too, make a backup copy first and then try it.

I can see the file /dev/pve/vm-100-disk-0 which is the VM I am looking for. I've tried mounting this in my live ubuntu USB, but get an error that the ntfs signature is missing. Am I trying to map the wrong file?