This post will guide you through how to access the contents of the virtual disk (LVM disk) directly so that you don’t need to boot the VM or when VM is not booting and you want to recover the data(windows or linux)

[root@node ~]# lvdisplay | grep centos
LV Path /dev/VolGroup/centos
LV Name centos

We need to create device maps from this LVM device’s partition tables.

kpartx -av /dev/VolGroup/centos

add map VolGroup-centos1 (253:8): 0 9912042 linear /dev/VolGroup/centos 63
add map VolGroup-centos2 (253:9): 0 562275 linear /dev/VolGroup/centos 9912105
add map VolGroup-centos : 0 562212 linear 253:9 9912168

Now we can mount the image and grab any files we may need.

mkdir /mnt/centos

mount /dev/mapper/vbox-centos1 /mnt/centos

Once we are done accessing our files, we can go ahead and unmount the partition and delete the partition mappings.

umount /mnt/centos

kpartx -d /dev/VolGroup/centos