Usually connecting external disks in Linux is easy. Plug it in, run fdisk -l or lsblk | grep disk to identify the device ID, and then mount it. Unfortunately in this instance, plugging in my Seagate 2TB wasn’t so simple. The server is running Proxmox: # uname -a Linux proxmox01 4.4.6-1-pve #1 SMP Thu Apr 21 11:25:40 CEST 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux No device showed up on lsblk or fdisk -l. In dmesg I saw:

So you’ve got a Linux VM that you want to access the contents of in EC2 - how do you do it? Let’s see how. First up, convert the VMDK to raw image file. If you’ve got a ova/ovf then just untar it first (tar -xvf my_vm.ova), from which you should get the VMDK. With that, convert it using qemu-img: $ time qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw SampleAppv607p-appliance-disk1.vmdk SampleAppv607p-appliance-disk1.raw real 16m36.