Mounting a second hard drive -- I can't figure out how to make qvm-block see it....

[bill...@gmail.com]

I am sure this is a silly issue, but I've been searching in the archives and can't see the answer.

I have a laptop with 1 SSD and 1 SATA drive. I installed Qubes on the SSD, and have a couple of data partitions on the SATA drive. I want to make one of those partitions available to my work vm or its template.

I was able to mount it on dom0 by putting it in the fstab. The /etc/fstab line is:

UUID=<number> /big ext4 defaults,discard,xsystemd.device-timeout=0 1 1

in dom0, it shows up as /dev/sda3. The df -h command, gives:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 903G 154G 703G 18% /big

I can't figure out how to make this disk available to my template or user vms.

In dom0, qvm-block l gives:

dom0:nvme0n1p4 ()
dom0:nvme0n1p5 ()
dom0:sda1 WDC_WD10SPZX-60Z1TO ()
dom0:sda2 WDC_WD10SPZX-60Z1TO ()

I have rebooted a few times, and it has not autmagically shown up.

I'm sure this is simple, but I'd like to mount it on my debian vm, and let all the user vms from that see it.

I can't find the howto page for this.

Thanks!

billo

[awokd]

bill...@gmail.com wrote on 3/24/19 8:48 PM:

> I am sure this is a silly issue, but I've been searching in the archives and can't see the answer.
>
> I have a laptop with 1 SSD and 1 SATA drive. I installed Qubes on the SSD, and have a couple of data partitions on the SATA drive. I want to make one of those partitions available to my work vm or its template.
>
> I was able to mount it on dom0 by putting it in the fstab. The /etc/fstab line is:
>
> UUID=<number> /big ext4 defaults,discard,xsystemd.device-timeout=0 1 1
>
> in dom0, it shows up as /dev/sda3. The df -h command, gives:
>
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda3 903G 154G 703G 18% /big
>
> I can't figure out how to make this disk available to my template or user vms.

Most flexible way to use the secondary drive would be to backup the data
somewhere else, then https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/secondary-storage/. If
you want to assign sda3 to a VM, you'd have to unmount it from dom0
first, then use qvm-block to attach it to a single VM at a time.

[bill...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, March 24, 2019 at 7:22:30 PM UTC-4, awokd wrote:
>
>
> Most flexible way to use the secondary drive would be to backup the data
> somewhere else, then https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/secondary-storage/. If
> you want to assign sda3 to a VM, you'd have to unmount it from dom0
> first, then use qvm-block to attach it to a single VM at a time.

Thanks. I'm happy to attach using qvm-block. My mistake was that I didn't recognize that if I mount the drive in dom0, then I can't attach it elsewhere using qvm-block.

Whenever I did qvm-block l in the vm, the drive didn't come up on the list -- so there was nothing to use qvm-block on. But, then, when I unmounted it from dom0 as you instructed, boom -- there it was.

Now that I think about it, it's a rather stupid security breach to mount the same drive in dom0 and "work," so this is a clear example of the design saving me from not thinking things through. Good on qubes.

And thanks for the answer.

-- on a totally unrelated note, is there a way to mark a question [SOLVED] in the subject line in Google Groups? I can't seem to edit it...

billo