Mounting a Physical Linux Disk in WSL

I have a dual-boot machine, and this is how I access my Linux side while booted into Windows.

In PowerShell

Find disk path

`GET-CimInstance -query "SELECT * from Win32_DiskDrive"

Note the PHYSICALDRIVE# value to use in the next command

Attach to default WSL instance (requires administrator rights)

wsl --mount \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE6 --bare

In WSL

Create a target directory (once) and mount the filesystem. The /dev/sdxy value needed for the mount command can be found by running sudo lsblk.

sudo mkdir /mnt/linux
sudo mount [-t <filesystem>] [-o <options>] /dev/sdxy /mnt/linux

Then bind mount the necessary system mounts.

for f in dev sys proc; do sudo mount -o bind /$f /mnt/linux/$f; done

Finally, chroot into the system, and mount the rest of the filesystems.

sudo chroot /mnt/linux
mount -a

Scripting the actual mount

On my system, which is a LUKS encrypted btrfs partition, I use a script, mountarch.sh, which drops me into the chroot, where I still need to run mount -a to finish mounting the rest of the Linux filesystems. The mapped device name here (/dev/mapper/linux-btrfs) matches the name I use in my /etc/fstab.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ $1 ]
then
  if [ -b $1 ]
  then
    echo Creating chroot from partition: $1
    cryptsetup open $1 linux-btrfs
    mount -t btrfs -o noatime,compress=zstd,space_cache=v2,subvol=@root /dev/mapper/linux-btrfs /mnt/arch
    for f in dev sys proc; do mount -o bind /$f /mnt/arch/$f; done
    chroot /mnt/arch/ /bin/bash
  else
    echo Partition $1 does not exist.
  fi
else
  echo Please specify target partition.
fi

Called with: sudo ./mountarch.sh /dev/sdc2 (after checking WSL-assigned device name with lsblk)

Questions? Comments?

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