WSL Cheatsheet

Mounting USB drives in Windows Subsystem for Linux

Windows Subsystem for Linux can use (mount):

• SD card

• USB drives

• CD drives (CDFS)

• Network drives

• UNC paths

Local storage / drives

Drives formatted as FAT, ExFAT or NTFS can be mounted in WSL. For this example, we assume the drive shows in Windows as F:\ If Windows changes the USB drive letter on a subsequent session, you need to repeat this process.

The commands are typed into the Windows Subsystem for Linux Terminal.

Create a mount location in WSL:

mkdir /mnt/f

Mount the drive in WSL:

mount -t drvfs f: /mnt/f

After this one-time setup, one can create and manipulate files from both Windows and WSL on the same drive.

network storage

Here we assume:

• networked storage is already showing in Windows under \\server\share

• we want to access this network storage from WSL as /mnt/share

Create a mount location in WSL:

mkdir /mnt/share

Mount the network share in WSL:

mount -t drvfs '\\server\share' /mnt/share

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