This is mainly for if you've done something silly like trying to clone a Live, running VM image.  In this example, the VM initially finds grub and tries to boot but is kicked straight into initramfs rescue mode/busybox right after this.

If you've done this "silly" thing, you could have dataloss but a lot of times just using fsck will fix it as you are guaranteed at best to have some corruption and inconsistencies in the filesystem.  My theory is that some files were corrupt or not in their right places (eg. inode issues, unclaimed blocks etc..).

In many of these cases, just run an fsck and you may find that you can successfully boot, but how much data you lose is dependent on your application and how much the filesystem changed before you started the copy/vs when it ended.

The correct way is to take a snapshot or at least make sure the VM is off.  Another alternative if you can't shutdown is to do rsync or some other similar remote filecopy that constantly updates.

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