[qubes-users] Can't access flash drive

I have a Sandisk Cruzer 8GB flash drive I’ve had for a few years, when I plug it in to Qubes it shows up in the available devices but when I connect it to any appvm it’s not rshowing up in the file manager. Other newer flash drives work fine. Any ideas?

Shawn Creighton:

I have a Sandisk Cruzer 8GB flash drive I've had for a few years, when I
plug it in to Qubes it shows up in the available devices but when I connect
it to any appvm it's not rshowing up in the file manager. Other newer flash
drives work fine. Any ideas?

NTFS format vs. ExFAT possibly.

I stumbled into the ExFAT issue a few years ago and had simply dismissed my own problem as not important until this thread showed up. I thought I might be able to help with this SanDisk thread so I pulled my Sandisk back out to take another closer look.

But that old ExFAT problem certainly is not the case here with my SanDisk Ultra_Fit because it turns out they are not even formatted with a Windows file system. I have three of four SanDisk in front of me, and none of them work with my fedora-32 based sys-usb, but all work perfectly fine with dom0 (fedora-25). They don’t show up in GParted in sys-usb but by inspecting them with GParted in dom0 I can see that two of them are iso9660 (Qubes 4.0.1 and 4.0.4) Install iso’s that were DD’ed directly to the device and both had been successfully booted and used to install my current Qubes system. I just keep them around in case of an emergency. The third SanDisk is formatted ext4 and at the moment is completely blank, because I can’t see it to even use it through my normal sys-usb. I have lots of other USB thumb drives that all work just fine but there is something different about these SanDisk drives. I also have a fourth SanDisk that I used without issue on a tails system but it simply could not be read by sys-usb and there is no way I’m even plugging that one into dom0. I ultimately used tails to re-transfer the files to yet another USB stick so I could finally transfer those files over and RE the binaries.

Bottom line, all four SanDisk Ultra_Fit 64gb are pretty much useless on a fedora-32 templated AppVM. Now I’m really curious to see what happens when using a different template for my sys-usb. For the moment I’m blaming the template or some missing driver, but I can’t really say for sure.

I have a Sandisk Cruzer 8GB flash drive I've had for a few years, when I plug it in to Qubes it shows up in the available devices but when I connect it to any appvm it's not rshowing up in the file manager. Other newer flash drives work fine. Any ideas?

What's the output of (Dom0):
* blkid /dev/your-stick
* fdisk -l /dev/yopur-stick

?