Recovery questions

[Brian LoBue]

Hi All,

I recently upgraded my Qubes machine to run fedora-25 from fedora-24 as the main template vm.  I switched all my application vms to use fedora-25 from fedora-24 in the VM manager. 

All was fine at this point. Then I decided to delete fedora-23 to reclaim some disk space. I followed the manual vm deletion instructions. Then things stopped working. Sys-net uses fedora-23 and the application vms give the error:

Error starting VM work: VM root image doesn't exist /var/lib/qubes/vm-templates/fedora-23/root.img

So I realize this is a user screw up by me. So if you can get over that I have some questions.

Is there a way to reinstall fedora-23 and get sys-net and my app vms to work again?

If not and I need to reinstall that's fine. I just need a few files from some app vms. 

I found this method to copy from vms to dom0 so I could backup files

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/copy-from-dom0/

Where are the app vm files stored? Are the files available from dom0 with the VM not running?

Thanks in Advance,

Brian

[awokd]

On Mon, January 22, 2018 4:54 pm, Brian LoBue wrote:

> Error starting VM work: VM root image doesn't exist
> /var/lib/qubes/vm-templates/fedora-23/root.img

> Is there a way to reinstall fedora-23 and get sys-net and my app vms to
> work again?

I'm not aware of a way to reinstall just the fedora-23 template from the
install image.

> If not and I need to reinstall that's fine. I just need a few files from
> some app vms.
>
> I found this method to copy from vms to dom0 so I could backup files
>
>
> https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/copy-from-dom0/

Unfortunately, you'd need to be able to start the appvms to use this method.

> Where are the app vm files stored? Are the files available from dom0 with
> the VM not running?

If possible, suggest you run a backup of the VMs with the GUI interface
instead of trying to access the files directly. You'd need to attach
another drive accessible to dom0 temporarily to backup to. If you go this
route, make sure to disconnect it prior to the reinstall so the installer
doesn't mess with it, then reconnect when done and restore.

The actual VM .img files are under /var/lib/qubes/appvms. You could copy
out those appvms' .img files directly to your backup drive, then mount
them from within a VM after a reinstall but again, make sure to disconnect
your backup drive for the install. Might not be a bad idea to copy these
over directly in addition to the backup, in case the backup/restore
process gets confused by missing templates.

[donoban]

On 01/22/2018 05:54 PM, Brian LoBue wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I recently upgraded my Qubes machine to run fedora-25 from fedora-24 as
> the main template vm.  I switched all my application vms to use
> fedora-25 from fedora-24 in the VM manager. 
>
> All was fine at this point. Then I decided to delete fedora-23 to
> reclaim some disk space. I followed the manual vm deletion instructions.
> Then things stopped working. Sys-net uses fedora-23 and the application
> vms give the error:
>
> Error starting VM work: VM root image doesn't exist
> /var/lib/qubes/vm-templates/fedora-23/root.img
>

Can't you set fedora-25 template?

Try: "qvm-prefs -s sys-net template fedora-25" on dom0 terminal

[donoban]

On 01/22/2018 05:54 PM, Brian LoBue wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I recently upgraded my Qubes machine to run fedora-25 from fedora-24 as
> the main template vm.  I switched all my application vms to use
> fedora-25 from fedora-24 in the VM manager. 
>
> All was fine at this point. Then I decided to delete fedora-23 to
> reclaim some disk space. I followed the manual vm deletion instructions.
> Then things stopped working. Sys-net uses fedora-23 and the application
> vms give the error:
>
> Error starting VM work: VM root image doesn't exist
> /var/lib/qubes/vm-templates/fedora-23/root.img
>