HDD disk full

[William Fisher]

I run qubes off a SSD and have a blank 1TB drive installed. Qubes sees it as 1TB "storage" but when I try to back up my VMs to it Qubes manager stops after 4GB and reports "disk is full". A USB HD backup by Qubes work fine with 65GB.
How can I fix my 1TB internal HD. It was formatted with FAT32

[Reg Tiangha]

On 03/23/2017 11:22 PM, William Fisher wrote:
> I run qubes off a SSD and have a blank 1TB drive installed. Qubes sees it as 1TB "storage" but when I try to back up my VMs to it Qubes manager stops after 4GB and reports "disk is full". A USB HD backup by Qubes work fine with 65GB.
> How can I fix my 1TB internal HD. It was formatted with FAT32
>

The file size limit of FAT32 is 4GB; you can't have files larger than
that size on that file system. You'd have to reformat that drive to a
file system that supports files bigger than 4GB. NTFS does it, but if
this is just to be used for Qubes or as a temporary stopgap measure,
you're probably better off making it ext4; I'm not sure how Qubes/Linux
would handle writing to NTFS. It could probably do it, but with large
files, who knows how it'll perform or how reliable it'll be since NTFS
support in Linux is all reverse-engineered as the specification was
never released by Microsoft, to my knowledge.

[William Fisher]

Could you tell me how to reformat the 1TB HD to ext4?
Is it in the manual somewhere?

[Reg Tiangha]

On 03/23/2017 11:31 PM, William Fisher wrote:
> Could you tell me how to reformat the 1TB HD to ext4?
> Is it in the manual somewhere?
>

What you could do (assuming you already have Qubes running on your
machine) is install gparted in a VM (it's available in both Debian and
Fedora), attach your blank drive to that VM, and then use gparted to
reformat it into whatever file system and whatever partition layout you
want. If you've ever used something like Partition Magic in Windows,
it's similar to that. You could also theoretically install it in dom0,
but if you're trying to maintain the security model of Qubes, you should
try to avoid installing as much extra stuff in dom0 as you can, and
running gparted in a VM to work on hard drives works just as well (I've
done it myself).

http://gparted.org/

[William Fisher]

Thank you. I'll try it. What's the command to start gparted?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "qubes-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/jVFIsydHntk/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to qubes-users...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to qubes...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/ob2ba1%24b7e%241%40blaine.gmane.org.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Reg Tiangha]

On 03/23/2017 11:41 PM, William Fisher wrote:
> Thank you. I'll try it. What's the command to start gparted?
>

You can type gparted on the command line, or it'll show up in your
application menu and you can start it that way.

[William Fisher]

I loaded gparted but it doesn't address or see the HD.(The HD is listed in dom0 as storage) How do I "attach" the drive to the VM with gparted?

[William Fisher]

or... how can I run gparted in dom0, and should I???

[Reg Tiangha]

In Qubes Manager, right click on your VM and the drive should be listed
under "Attach/detach Block Devices." Select the drive and it should then
be visible to the VM. Launch gparted and then it should be able to see
the drive.

[William Fisher]

Thank you!

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "qubes-users" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/qubes-users/jVFIsydHntk/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to qubes-users...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to qubes...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/ob3dng%244sj%241%40blaine.gmane.org.

[Unman]

You dont have to do this, of course.
because the drive is already attached to dom0 you can use the tools
already there:

fdisk/cfdisk to create or delete partitions
mkfs (and its derivatives) to format.

[William Fisher]

Can you give an example of the mkfs command to create a compatible storage drive for my Qubes system since the SSD is booting and running Qubes?

[Unman]

> > You dont have to do this, of course.
> > because the drive is already attached to dom0 you can use the tools
> > already there:
> >
> > fdisk/cfdisk to create or delete partitions
> > mkfs (and its derivatives) to format.
> >

Hello William,

Please try not to top post when mailing the list.

Most of this is standard, and you will find many good gudes online. In
brief, you want something like this-

I assume you have a single partition, and it appears in dom0 at
/dev/sdb1. Make sure you know which disk and partition you are working
on - otherwise things may get very bad.
Of course, have backups.

You can format this to ext4 by doing this as root:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

You will lose all the data on the existing partition, so if you want to
keep it, back it up first.
(Almost all of this requires root access so either use sudo or 'sudo su'
to get root.)

You can examine the disk, and repartition it if you want using
'cfdisk /dev/sdb'
That tool is quite easy to use.



Note that this partition wont be encrypted like your main Qubes
partition. This may not worry you, particularly if you only intend to
use it for encrypted backups.
But if you do want an encrypted disk, the process is somewhat more
involved, particularly if you want to use the same password as your
main Qubes disk, so you only need to enter one password.

Look in /dev/mapper to check the current name of your encrypted disk:
say luks-stringofstuff
'cryptsetup status luks-stringofstuff' - will show you the current
configuration.

Use fdisk or cfdisk to create a Linux partition on /dev/sdb
at sdb1
Then make an encrypted filesystem, using the SAME config as your main
disk: e.g.
'cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdb1 --key-size=512 --cipher=aes-xts-plain64'
When prompted use the same password you use for the main disk.

Then open the disk and create the filesystem:
'cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 data_enc'
'mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/data_enc'
'cryptsetup luksClose data_enc'

If you want to automatically mount the new drive at boot, then you need
to add it to /etc/fstab:
First get the UUID:
'blkid /dev/sdb1'
This will show you the UUID, and type which should be crypto_LUKS

Edit the file /etc/crypttab and add a line:
data_enc UUID=longlineofstuff none luks

Then make sure that the decrypted partition is mounted:
edit the file /etc/fstab, and add a line:
/dev/mapper/data_enc /store ext4 defaults 0 2

I hope that doesn't seem too complicated.
You can get more information online, or by using man for information -
e.g. man fstab
Be very careful and make sure you know what you are working on. And , of
course, have backups. (Did I say that before?)

unman