This is caused because the user is running as qemu for virt-resize and if qemu does not have privileges to read from the source and write to the destination, it will fail with the below. So either change the uid of qemu or change the ownership of the source and target. Solution: export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct virt-resize --expand /dev/sda2 /root/kvmtemplates/windows2019-eval-template.img /root/kvmguests/kvmkvmuser4515........

libguestfs tools howto guide for managing virtual machine images. libguestfs-tools aka guestfs tools has a lot of tools that make this very easy for you. You can easily mount partitons from an image with some of the commands below. To mount a partition #mount the kvmuser102821.img image and the /dev/sda1 partition from it to the local directory "mount" guestmount -a kvmuser102821.img -m /dev/sda1 mount ........