Uninstalling guest tools

If you find out that the guest tools are incompatible with some software inside a virtual machine, you can uninstall them by doing the following:

• Inside a Windows VM:

  1. Remove the QEMU device drivers from the device manager.

     Do not remove the VirtIO/SCSI hard disk driver and NetKVM network driver. Without the former, the VM will not boot; without the latter, the VM will lose network connectivity.

  2. Uninstall the QEMU guest agent and guest tools from the list of installed applications.

  3. Stop and delete Guest Tools Monitor:

     > sc stop VzGuestToolsMonitor
     > sc delete VzGuestToolsMonitor

  4. Unregister Guest Tools Monitor from Event Log:

     > reg delete HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\eventlog\Application\\
     VzGuestToolsMonitor

  5. Delete the autorun registry key for RebootNotifier:

     > reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /v \
     VzRebootNotifier

  6. Delete the C:\Program Files\Qemu-ga\ directory.

     If VzGuestToolsMonitor.exe is locked, close all the Event Viewer windows. If it remains locked, restart the eventlog service:

     > sc stop eventlog
     > sc start eventlog

  After removing the guest tools, restart the virtual machine.

• Inside a Linux VM:

  1. Remove the packages:

     1. On RPM-based systems (CentOS and other):

        # yum remove dkms-vzvirtio_balloon prl_nettool qemu-guest-agent-vz \
        vz-guest-udev

     2. On DEB-based systems (Debian and Ubuntu):

        # apt-get remove vzvirtio-balloon-dkms prl-nettool qemu-guest-agent-vz \
        vz-guest-udev

        If any of the packages listed above are not installed on your system, the command will fail. In this case, exclude these packages from the command and run it again.

  2. Remove the files:

     # rm -f /usr/bin/prl_backup /usr/share/qemu-ga/VERSION \
     /usr/bin/install-tools \
     
     /etc/udev/rules.d/90-guest_iso.rules /usr/local/bin/fstrim-static \
     /etc/cron.weekly/fstrim

  3. Reload the udev rules:

     # udevadm control --reload

  After removing guest tools, restart the virtual machine.