How to make VM with its data stored in USB drive

User Support
#1

I have a hard drive in my laptop, but It isn’t suitable enough for me to have all of the Virtual Machines that I need. I want to make a Windows 11 VM in Qubes OS (Qubes OS installed on my laptop), and then have the USB drive contain the virtual hard drive, (since the internal hard drive installed inside my laptop doesn’t have much more storage memory for the windows 11 virtual hard drive to be installed on it).

How can I setup a Qubes VM that has its data stored in a USB drive, and not in the computer’s hard drive?

#2

Not sure about security implications, but you can attach the USB drive from sys-usb to your HVM with this hack:
Find your USB device ID in sys-usb /dev/disk/by-id/XXX.
In dom0 terminal:
sudo cp /etc/libvirt/libxl/yourvmname.xml /etc/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen/by-name/.
Open /etc/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen/by-name/yourvmname.xml in editor remove all <disk>...</disk> blocks and add this block instead of them:

    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='phy' type='raw'/>
      <source dev='/dev/disk/by-id//XXX'/>
      <backenddomain name='sys-usb'/>
      <target dev='xvda' bus='xen'/>
    </disk>