Accesing slave drives?

User Support
1

Fell free to ignore this thread as I will eventually figure it out but if you feel like helping I would appreciate it.

Okay so I have followed the documentation several time and for the life of me can not get it to work. I only have experience with Kali linux and it automatically recognized my drives and put an Icon on the desktop to access them so I am not sure how to proceed.

Where exactly do I even look to find the slave drives to know if it even is working?

I see nothing show up in “Other locations” or in any of the folders in the files section.

What would I look up to find the “my computer” equivalent on a Linux system? Or is opening a slave drive something that requires a terminal command? I have followed the documentation and assigned my drives thru the gul/Qubes devises icon as well as thru the terminal but I just can not find them anywhere after that.

Any help would be appreciated, This is the last real problem I am having that is keeping me from being fully integrated into Qubes daily driving. Yay!

Edit: looking into Gnome disks now. Hoping this is the solution:D

any better options or ways to access disks without needing additional packages?

2

gnome-disks will be useful but not what I am after unfortunately. It was however enough for me to know that the disk attachment is working. Run without disks attached and they do not show up, run after attaching disks and they do show up. Still no way to access the actual data though:(

Could my problem be because my drives are formatted and filled with data from a windows PC?

This was not an issue for Kali Linux to automatically detect and allow me to use, is there maybe a package that Kali was using to make that happen?

If someone could tell me where to go to find disks I could figure it out from there.

3

Could anyone let me know if they know how to help with this please.

user@personal:~$ lsblk -p
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
/dev/xvda 202:0 1 10G 0 disk
├─/dev/xvda1 202:1 1 200M 0 part
├─/dev/xvda2 202:2 1 2M 0 part
└─/dev/xvda3 202:3 1 9.8G 0 part /
/dev/xvdb 202:16 1 25G 0 disk /rw
/dev/xvdc 202:32 1 10G 0 disk
├─/dev/xvdc1 202:33 1 1G 0 part [SWAP]
└─/dev/xvdc3 202:35 1 9G 0 part
/dev/xvdd 202:48 1 467.5M 1 disk
/dev/xvdi 202:128 1 2.7T 0 disk
├─/dev/xvdi1 202:129 1 128M 0 part
└─/dev/xvdi2 202:130 1 2.7T 0 part
/dev/xvdj 202:144 1 2.7T 0 disk
├─/dev/xvdj1 202:145 1 128M 0 part
└─/dev/xvdj2 202:146 1 2.7T 0 part
user@personal:~$ mkdir -p ~/hdd
user@personal:~$ sudo mount /dev/xvdi ~/hdd/
mount: /home/user/hdd: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/xvdi, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
user@personal:~$

4

I think it needs to be xvdi1 or xvdi2, you are trying to mount the device not the partition

5

im not exactly sure, my ultimate goal is to have xvdi and evdj run as one drive in raid1. But I would settle for just being able to access my movies and music and such.

user@personal:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda 202:0 1 10G 0 disk
├─xvda1 202:1 1 200M 0 part
├─xvda2 202:2 1 2M 0 part
└─xvda3 202:3 1 9.8G 0 part /
xvdb 202:16 1 25G 0 disk /rw
xvdc 202:32 1 10G 0 disk
├─xvdc1 202:33 1 1G 0 part [SWAP]
└─xvdc3 202:35 1 9G 0 part
xvdd 202:48 1 467.5M 1 disk
xvdi 202:128 1 2.7T 0 disk
├─xvdi1 202:129 1 128M 0 part
└─xvdi2 202:130 1 2.7T 0 part
xvdj 202:144 1 2.7T 0 disk
├─xvdj1 202:145 1 128M 0 part
└─xvdj2 202:146 1 2.7T 0 part
user@personal:~$ df -T
df: /run/user/1000/doc: Operation not permitted
Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda3 ext4 10013884 4429480 5054128 47% /
none overlay 10013884 4429480 5054128 47% /usr/lib/modules
devtmpfs devtmpfs 4096 0 4096 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 1048576 8716 1039860 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 58620 800 57820 2% /run
tmpfs tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
/dev/xvdb ext4 25726356 206312 25503660 1% /rw
tmpfs tmpfs 29308 64 29244 1% /run/user/1000
user@personal:~$

I am thinking maybe its a file system issue since the drives were used for raid1 on a windows PC. They dont seem to appear at all under the df -T command.

6

sudo mount /dev/xvdi2 ~/hdd/ does that work?

You can create a raid1 device in dom0 and expose that device to the qube, but you probably want to make a backup before you try that.

It’s the mdadm command you need to use to create the raid, but I doubt it works if the previous raid was configured by windows.

7

Thanks for the help, and no it didnt work.

user@personal:~$ sudo mount /dev/xvdi2 ~/hdd/
mount: /home/user/hdd/: mount point does not exist.
user@personal:~$

I think you put me on the right track with the mdadm tip though. It looks complicated but allegedly it will work with windows raid drives. Thanks!

8

It says you have not created the directory /home/user/hdd

9

Sorry, Ive been trying to post a screenshot since you sent this message but I cant manage. Tried ever
qvm-copy-to-vm <target_vm> combination I can think of to no avail. qvm-copy-to-vm --h gives another syntax and I tried every combination of that I can think of as well. Im going to call it a night but thanks for the assistance.

So I got hdd to atleast show up in the Other Locations section which is progress but when I try to open the drive it says I must be a superuser to do so… Ill try again in the AM thanks.

10

Is it a NTFS filesystem you have on the disk? If so, I think ntfs-3g could be the way to mount it - I don’t have any NTFS drives around, so I can’t test it … :-/

11

I have not figured it out yet. I did assume it was ntfs and tried mounting as such and received an error as well. I think I have reached the point that I need to just take a break and leave it be before I end up punching a hole in my monitor lol. Ill give it another try tomorrow probably but man I had almost forgot what anger felt like until these last few days.
I did have it at least showing up in my devises so I think I can get it when I have more patience. By the time I got close I was already so burnt out I couldnt take my time. At least I am on the right track now:D

thanks for all the help folks!

12

Apparently I did have an old NTFS drive hiding - and after assigning the drive to a fedora dvm, I can do:

[user@disp9077 ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release 
Fedora release 36 (Thirty Six)
[user@disp9077 ~]$ ls /dev/xvdi*
/dev/xvdi  /dev/xvdi1
[user@disp9077 ~]$ sudo mount /dev/xvdi1 hdd/
[user@disp9077 ~]$ ls hdd | wc -l
19
[user@disp9077 ~]$ sudo umount hdd
[user@disp9077 ~]$ rpm -qa | grep ntfs
ntfs-3g-libs-2022.10.3-1.fc36.x86_64
ntfs-3g-system-compression-1.0-9.fc36.x86_64
ntfsprogs-2022.10.3-1.fc36.x86_64
ntfs-3g-2022.10.3-1.fc36.x86_64
[user@disp9077 ~]$ 
[user@disp9077 ~]$ sudo -i
[root@disp9077 ~]# fdisk /dev/xvdi

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.38).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.


Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/xvdi: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xcbce2081

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/xvdi1         63 1953520064 1953520002 931.5G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Command (m for help): q

[root@disp9077 ~]#

Can you do something along those lines?

13

user@personal:~$ ls /dev/xvdi
/dev/xvdi
user@personal:~$ sudo mount /dev/xvdi hdd/
mount: /home/user/hdd: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/xvdi, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
user@personal:~$ sudo -i
root@personal:~# fdisk /dev/xvdi

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.36.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.

Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/xvdi: 2.73 TiB, 3000592982016 bytes, 5860533168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 0FCDCDA5-BB6C-11E7-98DB-F40669F66D3B

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/xvdi1 34 262177 262144 128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/xvdi2 264192 5860532223 5860268032 2.7T Microsoft Storage Spaces

Command (m for help): q

root@personal:~#

14

When I search for “Microsoft Storage Spaces mount linux”, I find:

that states:

Storage Spaces are based on a new proprietary file system from Microsoft called ReFS (resilient file system)

At the time of writing, there is no Open Source software that allows to mount this kind of file system, the only option right now is to use proprietary software:

ReFS for Linux by Paragon Software

I don’t know if it has changed since … but if it works on Kali Linux, it might have changed …

15

yea thanks for the help. I greatly appreciate it! I think im just going to give up honestly. Its not really a big deal. Ill just jump back to windows 10 and transfer the few files I really dont want to lose and head back to qubes and learn how to format and whatnot for Linux. It looks rather easy to do when things are formatted properly.

I needed to reinstall qubes anyway, I dont want the swap partition, I have 64 gb of ram so i dont need to be burning all those read writes on my nvme. If memory serves they degrade over time with use so no need for that.