Uhh... How do I remove a secondary storage pool?

User Support
1

I have a secondary VM pool for storing qubes. I need to remove it. I already moved all my qubes back to the default pool, but I can’t seem to tell Qubes to just get rid of it. “qvm-pool remove” complains that it’s still in use, even after a restart.

I tried booting from the Qubes USB installer to destroy the partition from there (I just zeroed out the first hundred megs). It worked… partially. Qubes still seems to think there’s a partition with a thin volume there. It won’t show under my attachable devices, although at least now it does show up in “ls /dev/bcache0p*”.

“qvm-pool remove” behaves the exact same way it did before I zeroed the partition so I don’t know what’s going on ._.

What do I do? I’m afraid something bad’s gonna happen after I re-arrange this disk array (it’s a RAID/bcache setup that’s getting completely re-done with new disks) if Qubes insists on getting a pool from there… and if there ends up being a partition with the same name as this one (which is very likely) then I hope Qubes doesn’t just syphon it out of me because I’m gonna need it

2

Check qvm-volume list --pool=NAME to see which VMs nominally have some of their storage volumes on the storage pool named NAME. If you remove those VMs, that should allow you to remove the pool afterwards.

3

Oh… well I ran that command and I think I just found a serious bug in Qubes.

The reason it wasn’t deleting was because when I cloned the VM’s (in order to put them back in the default pool), it actually created the clones in the secondary storage right next to the original copies even though I specifically went out of my way to check to make sure the DEFAULT pool was selected in the advanced tab… 120% feel betrayed by Qubes Manager… should’ve just stuck to the terminal ffs

No biggie though, the only VM’s I had in there were default templates.