Mounting non-NTFS/FAT filesystems on Windows via WSL2

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Not sure where to put this, so creating a new thread because it's excellent.

For those of us who need to use Windows at least sometimes, it can sometimes be necessary to mount filesystems that it doesn't natively support, whether that's just a ext3/ext4 disk, or a TrueCrypt or other encrypted partition.

The problem is that while it's hard to put one's finger on exactly where the problem lies, a system always seems less reliable after you've installed a third-party filesystem driver like ext2fsd and Microsoft is making a habit of breaking stuff like this that reaches into the internals going forward.

Well, good news- in the latest 'Windows Insider' builds (you have to turn on even more spying on your PC for now) you can pass full control over a block device over to Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). That lets you mount filesystems supported by the Linux kernel, which- conveniently- can then also be accessed to copy/move files from Windows as well.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk

If you want to mount encrypted volumes encrypted via cryptsetup, you'll need to make a small tweak and rebuild the kernel, no biggie.

https://gist.github.com/d4v3y0rk/e19d346ec9836b4811d4fecc1e1d5d64

I haven't successfully mounted a TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt volume yet, but I imagine this should be doable too.

 

[Arm Pit Cream]

I mounted your mother, and I can tell you that she was a FAT filesystem

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I mounted your mother, and I can tell you that she was a FAT filesystem

>Having sex with a FAT woman
Have you no shame or standards?

 

[teriyakiburns]

Interesting and potentially very useful. Is this more of microsoft's schizophrenia showing through, or are they actually starting to work toward a consistent approach to open source? And would we ever be able to tell?

>Having sex with a FAT woman
Have you no shame or standards?

as long as she wasn't fat16 at the time...

 

[Overly Serious]

So is this a viable way for me to work on software that uses a lot of softlinks whilst still on Windows? NTFS supports links but because of the different security models it's non-trivial to work on software developed on Linux systems using soft links on Windows. Could you have an IDE running in Windows with the codebase on, say, Ext4?

 

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So is this a viable way for me to work on software that uses a lot of softlinks whilst still on Windows? NTFS supports links but because of the different security models it's non-trivial to work on software developed on Linux systems using soft links on Windows. Could you have an IDE running in Windows with the codebase on, say, Ext4?

So, WSL2 already uses virtual hard disks formatted as EXT4 as the store of files (I believe the original WSL used some shit layered on top of NTFS). With 'Visual Studio Code' at least there is integration to launch a terminal inside the WSL2 VM and run stuff you're working on there.

If the source code has symlinks in it- you'd have to experiment with it I think. Looking at the WSL2 filesystem from Explorer on Windows, symlinks in the Linux fs don't have the same display as NTFS symlinks in Windows would, but that might also be the case if you browse a network drive and I'm not sure what the implications would even be for what you're trying to do.

 

[ditto]

If the source code has symlinks in it- you'd have to experiment with it I think.

I use pnpm on WSL2 when I have to work on node webshit. It uses symlinks extensively and works fine.

 

[Dick Justice]

It's been two decades, how do we still not have native ext support?

E: Fixed. I don't know

 

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It's been two decades, how do we still not have native et ext support?

Native what support?
EDIT: Ah, yeah I guessed ext was probably what you meant after replying. There have been a number of commercial projects around and the open source ext2fsd which I've used in the past, but I guess when it comes down to it only weirdos like me format external drives in EXT3, so the only real use would be if you wanted to have a drive shared across a Windows/Linux dual boot which could provide extended Unix filesystem features, unlike say just having it in FAT32/vFAT. It would only ever really see very small adoption by a small number of consumers, no enterprisey stuff, so no real advantage to Microsoft to add something of that nature.

And now we have something even better.. you can mount a CD image from a ReiserFS partition encrypted with LUKS, no dramas at all.