You didn’t mention having seen this, so I’m dropping it here in case it helps at all. It doesn’t contain the exact answer to your question but might contain some relevant hints.
I’m trying to do a whole disk encryption leaving the header and boot-loader on the USB drive. So I don’t want the boot partition to be stored on the storage device. Hence I don’t need to create two partitions. I would like the whole disk to be encrypted without any boot files.
I have seen the documentation prior to the installation.
I tried that, Didn’t work. I tried to refresh the disk in terminal also on the re-scan option provided on the GUI still the disk isn’t getting detected in the GUI.
It’s work with 4.1 i’ve tried with latest 12-06 and 26-06 iso. I’m still researching how to make it work with encrypted /boot and detachable luks header.
It’s been a while since I did a custom install with Qubes but I remember having difficulties with manual partitioning and finalizing. I wiped the drive and for some reason I still got some error message saying there was not enough space or some problem with my setup.
I removed my SSD from my laptop and connected it via external usb hard drive caddy. I had no problems with a custom install then.
I don’t know if this helps with your specific setup but you could try it this way.
creating file system
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root
mkswap /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-swap
mounting
mount /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root /
swapon /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-swap
setting up pendrive with two partition of type Ext4 and efi.
mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sdf
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdf1
I have only gotten this far, After many retries only once i could see the partition in GUI and i have no idea how i got it that time. I’m retrying with different options still GUI shows my disk blank without lvm.
If you go further please do help me, i will still be working on this and make it work.
Thanks for your time and replies. Glad you are also trying to do the same thing as me. hopefully together and with the help of qubes community we can do this.
Yes, I tried wiping my disk removing adding,reloading. it didn’t work but thanks for your suggestion. I will keep trying out to find possible solution.
If you want just fde + bootloader in usb, installer are smart enough to did this.
Just select 2 disk on installer. Then you can select automatic and wipe all data.
if you wonder how installer did this, you can select custom then select automatic partitioning (you can change your fs type first, then click on automatic partitioning, doesn’t matter what are file type is, installer will create bootloader on usb).
This way be careful not to create a sys-usb, your system will crash.
With what i talked before, it’s same, the different is header in root. but still you won’t ever can boot if you lost the usb.
The only way you can boot if you lose is make a bootloader again with qubes rescue and enter the disk passphrase.