Are you by any chance over-allocating resources? Maybe your vm-storage ran out of disk space and when your vm requested swap it blew up.
Or, if you are using network storage (NFS, iSCSI, FC) the connection went away; which is essentially just like a disappearing drive. The OS will panic and the disks will be in an inconsistent state.
If you find a vswp file, try renaming it, booting and re-renaming it again.
You did not backup your vm's to another storage, right?
Also, I don't think you need to mount a drive to run that python tool which tries to recover keys. If you succeed mounting the partitions however, you can simply copy your wallet. The python tool only dumps the keys it can find if I remember correctly (it's somewhat like a brute-force search).
I only meant to set up the loopback to run the tool on in case it wanted an actual block device instead of a file. You are right there is no need to mount it.