I'm using CentOS 5.4 with KVM as my host. It had been working fine then one day LUKS decided to stop accepting my password. I'm not sure what the deal is but maybe bad drive. Anyway, I was forced to reinstall CentOS on another drive. I had previously installed a Ubuntu VM to a dedicated flash drive, but now using the new installation, I can't access it. sdb1 shows up but can't be mounted. The docs read that when installing a VM to a disk the raw format is used, so maybe there is not a proper filesystem on that drive? Is there any way to access this VM or will I have to recreate from scratch?

if its raw, ther's no FS on that drive, just the raw image.
you can create a new VM and set it to use the old drive as its image

Ok, cool, I was hoping it was something simple. I'm really new to KVM, so can you go into a little more detail on this? When I choose "New" under the virtual machine manager it asks for an installation media and a location to install to. There is no option to open an existing image. Next to the "New" button there is an "Open" button which is grayed out. I've also tried the "Restore saved machine" option under File and that doesn't work either. So, how do I make a new VM and point it to the old location without it overwriting with a new install?

Alright! After hours of searching I found this: http://www.denraf.be/category/tagcloud/virt-manager Which explains the counter-intuitive process of starting the install to disk then stopping before it can copy files. Considering how easy this was, I wonder why no one said how to do it? I guess very few people know about this.