External hard drive does not show in qube as storage device

User Support
1

Hello

Having an issue with creating a backup. When the external hard drive is attached and the block device is attached to a qube, it doesn’t show up as an available storage device.

2

Did you mount it after attaching it to that qube? Attaching is not enough. In case you are not familar with Linux, just having a block device is not enough to see its contents. You still have to mount it. Then you can look inside it and also select it as the destination of your backup. If you are new to both Linux and Qubes, try running the following in the terminal cd; mkdir here; sudo mount /dev/xvdi here. Now you should be able to select /home/user/here/ as the destination of your backup. (If this doesn’t work, try /dev/xvdi1 instead of '/dev/xvdi`. I don’t know your exact configuration and what exactly you attached to that qube.)

1 Like
3

Changed the title. The issue at hand seems not to be related with backing up. It just happened to be what you were trying to achieve.

Have you taken a look at the related documentation yet?

4

I am somewhat familiar with Linux and have been using Qubes for a couple of years now. Normally when an external storage device is attached, it is recognized by the usb qube and you are able to attach it to another qube and view the drive within the "other locations section of the file manager GUI. Right now when it is attached, it is not showing up at all in the attached Qube. I have also tried mounting the partitions individually but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.

5

Also, when you mount the device recognized by the USB Qube to another Qube, all of the devices partitions show up. Could the be because of the filesystem format?

6

Hi

The issue seemed to be an unrecognized filesystem. The partition standard was GPT but seemed to contain a macOS based filesystem which was not recognized or mountable. After reformatting and using ext4 the disk is recognized and mountable.

7

Excellent! Just to try to follow up on your other questions, if you are passing a block device, it depends on whether you pass the entire thing as in sda or just a single partition as in sda1 or sda2. In the former case, the partition table will be visible in the destination qube and nautilus may be able to let you mount and open the partitions. In the latter case, I believe nautilus won’t show you the partition as mountable, because it won’t know what is going on. You will have to do this yourself, for instance, from the command line.

8

I hear you but in my case nothing showed up at all in nautilus. it was recognized by dom0 using parted but the GUI for the Qube it was attached to showed nothing, it didn’t even recognize the disk was mounted to the qube.