Chroot Suggested Mounts for Rescue

When a libvirt guest will not boot and you need to drop into its filesystem, the tricky part is getting all the mounts right before you chroot. virt-rescue can do the heavy lifting for you.

Getting the Suggested Mounts

Run virt-rescue in suggest mode against your guest. This prints the exact mount commands you need without actually starting a session:

virt-rescue --suggest -d instance-000086e2

For a typical single-disk guest you will see output like this:

mount /dev/vda1 /mnt/sysroot/
mount --bind /dev /mnt/sysroot/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/sysroot/dev/pts
mount --bind /proc /mnt/sysroot/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sysroot/sys

Copy those commands into your shell (or a script) and run them in order. Once the filesystem is mounted, you can chroot into it:

chroot /mnt/sysroot

Starting an Interactive Rescue Session

If you prefer virt-rescue to handle the mounts and drop you straight into a shell, skip the manual steps and launch an interactive session:

virt-rescue -d instance-000086e2

This gives you a minimal shell inside the guest with /dev, /proc, and /sys already bound. You can edit configs, reset passwords, or inspect logs, then exit when you are done.

A Few Tips

• Run virt-rescue as root or a user in the libvirt group.
• If the guest uses LVM or a logical volume, the suggest output will include the appropriate device path instead of a raw partition.
• After you are done, unmount in reverse order or simply reboot the guest; libvirt will release the disk.

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