Help getting usb external drive mounted on WSL2 Ubuntu in Win10

[flyenz0]

Hi all,

Very new to GitHub, trying to run a Linux-based EPA air pollution modeling code on a low spec Windows 10 PC. I previously attempted to run the code via VirtualBox VMs (Linux Mint and Rocky Linux) on the same PC with some success, but the fatal flaw was there was no way ~16TB of output files would fit in the 1GB leftover internal drive space, and I'm unlikely to get a internal drive upgrade anytime soon. I have access to a few old 6-18TB external drives I can repurpose, but it's unclear how they would work with VirtualBox given the complex and deep nested directory structure the EPA code needs, given that I've only used shared folders with the VMs.

A colleague suggested I look into WSL and it sounded like a viable option, so I installed WSL2 with Ubuntu 24.04 following the Microsoft instructions and added usbipd support including a new kernel following the instructions from this YouTube video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyBfQXmyH4o

As shown in the attached screenshot I was able to do the usbipd bind (had to use the --forced option) and attach, and checking with lsusb and lsblk seemed to show the expected results. But when trying to mount the external drive I get errors and the mount fails, and I don't have enough experience to understand why. The external drives seem to be ntfs but they contain old Linux output files from previous EPA code runs, and I can access them from a borrowed Linux machine. I don't know if that's a problem, although I did get an ntfs error when I tried to mount just the ntfs partition of the 18TB drive. I also turned off the fast boot option on the PC and rebooted every time I needed to test attaching and detaching the drive, but I can't seem to get anywhere. I'm hoping someone on the forum has solved a similar problem before and can help, thanks.

[flyenz0]

For what it's worth I found a solution in the Microsoft WSL webpages (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/)

step 1 (in Powershell)
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart

step 2 (in Powershell)
sudo mount -t drvfs D: /mnt/d

step 3 (in WSL)
cd /mnt/d
ls -al /mnt/d

I'd actually tried starting from step 2 unsuccessfully before finding out I had to do step 1 first (not obvious from the instructions), but I was finally able to view the 16TB external USB drive from WSL. I did notice access was quite slow, a simple ls taking up to 10 seconds to execute, so it doesn't fully solve my problem of running Linux executables that save files onto an external ntfs drive.

I still don't understand why my previous tries using the usbipd commands didn't work. I would have preferred that only the Linux executables (which require a specific save directory structure) in WSL had access to the external drive, and usbipd does remove it from the list of Windows 10 drives. With the drvfs method above the external drive is still visible in the list of Windows drives and may still be affected by Windows operations.