Mount a QCOW or VMDK File

There are various utilities for mounting and manipulating qcow and vmdk files. Here we will focus on the libguestfs/guestfish suite of tools, which provides a full interactive shell for manipulating many image types.

The steps below take place in the interactive guestfish shell. Replace image_file with the path of an actual qcow or vmdk file:

# guestfish -a image_file
gf# run
gf# mount /dev/sda1 /
gf# ls /
gf# umount-all
gf# quit