If you want to access a Linux disk format that isn’t supported by Windows, you can use WSL 2 to mount your disk and access its content.
This tutorial will cover the steps to identify the disk and partition to attach to WSL2, how to mount them, and how to access them.
Administrator access is required to attach a disk to WSL 2.
Identify the disk
To list the available disks in Windows, run:
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wmic diskdrive list brief
Example output:
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PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> wmic diskdrive list brief
Caption DeviceID Model Partitions Size
Intel Raid 0 Volume \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 Intel Raid 0 Volume 1 1500307522560
NVMe Samsung SSD 960 SCSI Disk Device \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 NVMe Samsung SSD 960 SCSI Disk Device 4 500105249280
OCZ-VERT EX4 SCSI Disk Device \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2 OCZ-VERT EX4 SCSI Disk Device 2 128034708480
The disks paths are available under the ‘DeviceID’ columns. Usually under the \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE* format.
List and select the partitions to mount in WSL 2
Once the disk is identified, run:
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wsl --mount <DiskPath> --bare
This will make the disk available in WSL 2.
Once attached, the partition can be listed by running the following command inside WSL 2:
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lsblk
This will display the available block devices and their partitions.
Inside Linux, a block device is identified as /dev/<Device><Partition>. For example, /dev/sdb3, is the partition number 3 of disk sdb.
Example output:
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NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb 8:16 0 1G 0 disk
├─sdb2 8:18 0 50M 0 part
├─sdb3 8:19 0 873M 0 part
└─sdb1 8:17 0 100M 0 part
sdc 8:32 0 256G 0 disk /
sda 8:0 0 256G 0 disk
Mount the device
If you want to create an image of this drive, than do not do this step. This step is only used for accessing Files on the drive inside of WSL.
- Create a mountpoint at your desired destination (normally in
/mnt/)
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sudo mkdir /mnt/drive1p1
- List all available partitions for the given drive (if you already know the drives identifier you can pass it to
lsblk, otherwise just runlsblkwithout any parameters)
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fabian@Workstation:/mnt/d$ lsblk /dev/sdc
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdc 8:48 0 223.6G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:49 0 256M 0 part
└─sdc2 8:50 0 223.3G 0 part
- Mount a partition
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sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/drive1p1
- After you are done, you can unmout the drive
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sudo umount /mnt/drive1p1
Create on the fly compressed Images of a Disk with WSL
We will use PLZIP for compression.
PLZIP - Lzip is a lossless data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm, with very safe integrity checking and a user interface similar to the one of gzip or bzip2. Lzip decompresses almost as fast as gzip and compresses better than bzip2, which makes it well suited for software distribution and data archiving.
Plzip is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) version of lzip using the lzip file format; the files produced by plzip are fully compatible with lzip.
Plzip is intended for faster compression/decompression of big files on multiprocessor machines, which makes it specially well suited for distribution of big software files and large scale data archiving. On files big enough, plzip can use hundreds of processors.
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sudo apt-get install plzip
This creates a image-file of a disk
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sudo dd if=/dev/sda status=progress | plzip -9 -v > ./DiskImage.img.lz
or with p7zip
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sudo dd if=/dev/sdd status=progress | 7z a -si ./DiskImage.img.7z
With this command you can write the image-file to a disk
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sudo plzip -v -d ./DiskImage.img.lz | dd of=/dev/sda status=progress
or with p7zip
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sudo 7z x -so DiskImage.img.7z | dd of=/dev/sda status=progress
Detaching a disk from WSL
To detach a disk from WSL 2, run:
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wsl --unmount [DiskPath]
If Diskpath is omitted, all attached disks are unmounted and detached.
If one disk fails to unmount, WSL 2 can be forced to exit by running
wsl --shutdown, which will detach the disk.