Thanks to my colleague Marcin for thie guestmount tools protip.

I wrote a previous guide which explains how to download/export a Cloud server image VHD from Rackspace Cloud, which is failing to build. It might allow you to perform data recovery, even if the image can’t be booted. Which I’m guessing someone is going to run into sooner or later, and will be pleased to see this article, it will at least give you a best shot at reading the VHD and recovering it, since as you might know already, just because boot or kernel is broken, doesn’t mean that the data isn’t there!

# A better article to use if you want to download via commandline
https://community.rackspace.com/products/f/25/t/3583

# My article doing this thru a web-browser which might be useful too for some customers
https://community.rackspace.com/products/f/25/t/7089

Once the image gets downloaded to your new cloud instance you can use ‘libguestfs-tools’ package (same name on Ubuntu and CentOS) which contains tools necessary for mounting .vhd image files.

The command would be (read-only mode):

guestmount -a {image-name}.vhd -i --ro {mount-point}