Where (what qube?) to use to view all connected disks?

User Support
1

I’ve searched for issues using queries like “where to view disks” and “how to display drives”, unfortunately it’s difficult to know what exactly to say to find the relevant discussion, I assume this has been explained elsewhere.

Clicking the drive icon on the tray doesn’t really show what I’m looking for. It lists volumes (linux-kernel, varlibqubes, vm-pool). This is not useful info to me. My preferred way to view disks is using gnome-disks-utility. But since qubes are compartmentalized, any qube I open this app in will only show block devices, never the whole disk (I’m looking for a 2TB disk, connected via m.2 slot, what shows up here isn’t any more than a few GB). I don’t have a dedicated USB qube, and I’m not about to install gnome disks in dom0. So where do I find my disks?

This article seems relevant: How to use block storage devices — Qubes OS Documentation. But I can’t find
image on my system tray.

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I made a PR to fix the icon in Qubes 4.3:

But I think that you have some trouble because your disk is not an external drive. Take a look at:

But I don’t think it is what you want?

1 Like
3

@parulin

The internal SSD is my Fedora host drive. I don’t want to use it as secondary storage. I just want to see how I can actually access the drive and display it in gnome disks.

4

gnome-disks is not installed in dom0, so you cannot. You could install
gnome-disks using sudo qubes-dom0-update gnome-disks - it’s a small
install with few dependencies.

I think the major question is why? What is it that you want to do that
you need this utility?

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

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5

One thing I don’t recommend using is the disk monitor on KDE. Probably due to how many volumes there is on Qubes, the disk monitor starts consuming a lot of resources and might freeze your system. This was on R4.2, didn’t test since and I don’t recommend fiddling with such thing on dom0.

6

In dom0 cli

fdisk -l

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Don’t do this!

It causes dom0 to parse VM volumes* for partition tables. VM volume content is fully controlled by the VM and potentially malicious.

* All running VMs’ volumes on Btrfs/XFS; not sure about LVM

This seems like a general caveat for such tools in dom0: You don’t want to use a tool that automatically scans each and every “disk” (including virtual ones representing VM volumes). Besides the security risk, it could also cause data corruption if a VM volume “disk” that is already mounted in the VM is automatically (or after one click in the wrong place) mounted in dom0 too.

1 Like
8

I would not have thought of this. Is there a warning similar to opening Tor Browser in the template?