Can I use qubes to partition an external USB drive?

I have read the How-To Guide: How to use block storage devices

But it doesn’t seem to answer my question: I bought an external USB drive that came with a single ntfs partition. Now I want to use qubes to make an encrypted parition on this drive, but I cannot see how to do this?

All I can do is connect a VM to the existing partition. I cannot get parted to read the drive. gparted sees the mounted drive but cannot modify the existing parition (I want to shrink it).

Is it possible to partition an external drive using qubes, and if yes how?

You have to connect the ROOT of the drive if you want to be able to edit the partition table :slight_smile:

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Right!

So the answer is yes: I connect to the ROOT as you said, in my case sys-usb-disposable:sdb.

Then using gparted I can see the the device/partition in my case was /dev/xvdj1

Then I followed these instructions to shrink the existing ntfs partition.

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