How to access/mount my second ssd (/dev/sdb) in Qubes OS. - also need to format it first

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1

how to access/mount my second ssd (/dev/sdb) in Qubes OS.
also need to format it first

Can not find an easy guide for beginner to follow

2

Can you be more clear? What exactly do you want to do? Use that second
drive to store new qubes, or attach the drive to other qube for use
as storage in that qube.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.

3

Yep, i missed some detail
It was to access the drive in a VM

Solved:
a) the sdb contained an old Qubes OS and it was not possible to access/format it because the disk was protected.
So I use another live linux distro (reboot on a USB) to use gnome-disks to erase the partitions and reformat as ext4 - it required 2 pass, 2 reboot
b) Attach sdb to the desired VM, using the gui button at top right
mkdir dirfolder
sudo mount /dev/vxdi1 (something like that) dirfolder
change permission on dirfolder : chmod …

Thanks

4

That’s interesting, I don’t have permission issues when mounting an ext4.

I do mount to a subdirectory inside /home/user though; that might make a difference.

(If you ever try to mount fat32, exfat or ntfs, you might need:

-o uid `id -u`,gid=`id -g`

in your mount call, or you end up with a read only mount. However if you do this with any other file system like ext4 it will refuse to mount at all. So you made a good choice; ext4 is easier.)

I ended up automating the whole mount process with a script, part of which does lsblk -f /dev/xvdi -o FSTYPE -n to get the file system type before mounting (change xvdi to xvdj, etc); it then issues a different mount command based on the file system found (and it supports zfs-formatted devices which work VERY differently).

5

wow, thanks for the extra info