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Hello everyone!
I need help with a KVM virtual machine on Linux Debian 12.
I was working inside a Windows 10 VM when the power suddenly went out and my computer shut down. Since then, I haven’t been able to start the VM, even though it contains important files I need. I didn’t have time to make a backup because I never anticipated this could happen.
When I open Virtual Machine Manager, my VM no longer appears in the list. If I try to mount the virtual disk, I can’t open it—even though the win10.qcow2 file is still in the folder.
Please let me know how I can get the VM running again or at least extract the files from the disk.

4 Spice ups
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What happens if you try to create a new VM and attach this disk?

  1. Open Virtual Machine Manager.
  2. Click “Create a new virtual machine”.
  3. Choose “Use an existing disk image” and point to your win10.qcow2.
  4. Set the OS type to Windows 10.
  5. Allocate the same CPU/RAM settings as before.
  6. Finish the wizard and try to boot.
4 Spice ups
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Also, what are the permissions of the folder it’s saying you don’t have permissions for?
What happens when you run ‘sudo virt-manager’?
Nevermind on that last question, that’s what I get as well.
Maybe an issue with your group associations though, what you see looks like what I get if I’m not in the qemu and libvirt groups.

1 Spice up
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I tried to do that in the first place, as you can see in the second screenshot

Screenshot from 2025-06-26 04-00-22
Screenshot from 2025-06-26 04-00-221909×1075 187 KB
1 Spice up
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Your screenshot doesn’t explicitly say this is what you were doing, for all I knew you could have had multiple windows open for other reasons.

Copy the file to another location, do you get the same error?

1 Spice up
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I’ve moved it and was able to select win10.qcow2 to launch, but now I’m getting this error.

photo_2025-06-27_14-50-11
photo_2025-06-27_14-50-111280×720 45.9 KB
1 Spice up
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Working on a copy (as a precaution).

qemu-img check -r all yourfile.qcow2

This will look for and attempt to repair errors

1 Spice up
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I tried countless solutions, including rebuilding the virtual machine with the same configurations. The error disappeared, but the VM still wouldn’t start. A window would briefly open and then immediately close.

However, I finally found a way to recover my files using Hetman Partition Recovery. I mounted the KVM virtual disk in the software, scanned it for existing files, and successfully saved them to a USB flash drive. I then immediately made multiple backup copies and uploaded them to cloud storage.

P.S. Always make backups—anyone can end up in a similar situation. Thanks to everyone who responded and tried to help!

For those interested, here’s the article that helped me:

https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/how-to-recover-data-from-linux-kvm-virtual-machines-installing-and-configuring-a-virtual-machine.htm

1 Spice up
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Thanks for letting us know you were back up and running.

1 Spice up