Mounting disk with data to talos

[soorajnair]

I'm new to Talos and currently transitioning from Flatcar and Ubuntu. I'm stuck at a point where I need help. I have several disks formatted with ext4, each containing terabytes of important data. I want to mount these existing disks on a Talos node without losing any of the data, and then make them available to Kubernetes pods using the hostPath volume type.

Since Talos OS is minimal and immutable, and doesn't have a traditional package manager or file system layout, I'm unsure how to correctly mount these pre-existing disks persistently across reboots and make them accessible to the kubelet and pods.

Could someone guide me on:

1. How to safely mount these existing ext4 disks on a Talos node.

2. How to persist the mount configuration via Talos machineconfig.

3. Any best practices or caveats to avoid data loss.

Any help or example configurations would be greatly appreciated!

[smira]

Talos right now in version 1.10 doesn't have that option exposed in the machine configuration to do what you described (to mount some existing volumes which were not managed by Talos previously).

I think it's a great idea to have, and I'm going to open an issue for it.

Right now, there are hacky ways to do this by making sure partition layout matches Talos expectations and Talos would mount the volume as if it was previously created by Talos.

E.g. if you create a User Volume, and make sure your existing partition as a partition label which matches Taos expectations, and Talos will mount it back.

[smira]

See #11153

[soorajnair]

i had tried this trick with uservolumeconfig, but it expects a max-memory/min-memory even though doc says its optional.

[soorajnair]

Seems like it going to come in Talos 1.11

…

On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM Andrey Smirnov ***@***.***> wrote: See #11153 <#11153> — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#11150 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABT7DN7TQYBZG2GGW4HQZNT3B3KVHAVCNFSM6AAAAAB6RW3OLKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGMZWG4YDKNQ> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[soorajnair]

For the time being I am going to try to create a privileged pod with a hostpath. Then mount a disk (or filesystem) to that hostpath. Effectively, making a mount inside the pod affects the host system. On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 6:19 PM Sooraj S Nair ***@***.***> wrote:

…

Seems like it going to come in Talos 1.11 On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM Andrey Smirnov ***@***.***> wrote: > See #11153 <#11153> > > — > Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub > <#11150 (reply in thread)>, > or unsubscribe > <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABT7DN7TQYBZG2GGW4HQZNT3B3KVHAVCNFSM6AAAAAB6RW3OLKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGMZWG4YDKNQ> > . > You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: > ***@***.***> >