Moving a WSL2 installation to another drive
Moving a WSL2 installation to another drive
Preface
It’s been a while since I have written something so I guess it’s time to come up with some boring stuff to celebrate isn’t it ?
This blogpost will be very short but I found it pretty interesting because it’s about something I just did for my use case and now I know it will be somewhere if I ever need to do it again.
So if just like me you like reinstalling your system pretty often and you can’t be bothered to make backups, I think it might be useful since it takes at most five minutes to be done (or you can do it in a second by :q!-ing this blogpost).
Now let’s get to the very important stuff, enjoy !
Disclaimer
The following procedure is system destructive, meaning that it will still remove all files in your virtual system, but your core system will remain the same.
Please do backups (forget what I’ve said above) and proceed to the next step if you’re good with it.
As stated before I already did it but for clarity I will still provide screenshots and everything needed, let’s get to it.
Credits to this post I used to make this blog post, it’s the exact same procedure but I’ll do my best to make it easier with the aforementioned screenshots.
Quick overview of what we’re about to do
If you still didn’t catch what we are going to do, here is a tl;dr made up of three main steps :
- We will make a backup of the current installation (in my case Ubuntu but it will work for any distribution installed)
- We will restore it to whatever drive you want, here I will use my SSD denoted by the
D:letter. - Once everything is successful, we will remove the initial installation to free up space (phew) and be done with this tutorial.
As stated above, I am using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (at the time of the post’s release) but it will work with Debian, Arch Linux, OpenSUSE or any other obscure distribution as long as you run it through WSL2.
Prerequisites
Before starting this tutorial, make sure you have:
- WSL2 installed and enabled on your Windows system
- An existing WSL distribution already set up (Ubuntu, Debian, etc.) that you want to move
- A secondary drive with enough free space to hold your WSL installation (check your current installation size first)
- PowerShell access (with administrator privileges recommended)
Optional but recommended:
- Basic familiarity with command-line operations
- Knowledge of your WSL username (the one you created during initial setup)
Beginning of the tutorial
Creating the base structure on the other disk
First we are going to create two directories under the targeted disk, here I will use my SSD, denoted by the letter D:, but replace it with the letter assigned to yours.
Open a PowerShell terminal and enter the following three commands :
mkdir D:\WSL\instances\Ubuntu2204 # Create the folder corresponding to your distribution
mkdir D:\WSL\images # The future base system will be imported here
cd D:\WSL\images # Change your CWD here
Once you’ve created those two directories, your current structure should be as follow :
PS D:\WSL> dir
D:.
├───images
└───instances
└───Ubuntu2204
Exporting and importing your installation to the new location
Once done with the directories creation, you should still be in the /images directory, stay inside and get to the next step.
We’re already 80% done (I told you it wouldn’t take ages) ! Now we’re about to export your current installation (that is still on your C: drive) to a new one located on your second disk.
Do the following on the same PowerShell session :
wsl --export Ubuntu ubuntu.tar
wsl --import Ubuntu2204 D:\WSL\instances\Ubuntu2204 ubuntu.tar --version 2
# Here, even if you are using Ubuntu like me, your installation could be named differently than "Ubuntu". # To verify this, please do 'wsl --list' beforehand and replace it with the name given on the left side of the output.
# Exemple :
# PS D:\WSL> wsl --list
# Windows Subsystem for Linux Distributions:
# Ubuntu
# You can clearly see that the correct one will be "Ubuntu".
The first line creates the backup (ubuntu.tar) from your existing installation , while the second creates a new WSL instance named Ubuntu2204 (instead of the default Ubuntu) on your newly selected drive (still D: for my case).
Starting the new instance and deleting the old one
If you’ve done everything correctly up to this point you should see the splendid word successful appearing on your screen, if not, please double check the previous commands + that you used the same name everywhere.
If that still doesn’t work, I will not pay attention to any death threat and assume that I’m not dumb at explaining things… I hope…
So, once you exported & imported your new installation successfully, let’s run it and make a couple of changes so it detects the user you created during the initial setup.
Still in a PowerShell session (I promise we’re almost done), do
wsl ~ -d <your_distribution_name> (Ubuntu2204 for me)
You should now be logged in as root since WSL2 doesn’t “remember” the user you used at the very start :
PS D:\WSL> wsl ~ -d Ubuntu2204
root@laptop
Now, edit the WSL configuration file located at /etc/wsl.conf by doing :
sudo -e /etc/wsl.conf
By default you should only have the [boot] entry so you will have to add the [user] one below, by adding the name of your current user accordingly.
# /etc/wsl.conf
[boot]
systemd=true
[user]
default=user
Once that is done, save and exit nano by doing Ctrl+O then Ctrl+X.
Now, save and exit Ubuntu and do wsl --terminate <your_distribution_name> then wsl ~ -d your_distribution_name in your PowerShell session.
Now, when you type wsl ~ you will start in that instance, you can confirm by running wsl --list.
Once you have confirmed that everything is working as it should and you’re sure you didn’t miss anything (in that case you’re free to start over again,), you can remove the original by doing
wsl --unregister <your_previous_distribution_name>.
Please remember that everything will be gone for good and you won’t be able to recover it, so if you got any doubt take another 30 minutes to do it again so you’re sure everything will be done correctly.
You should now be running your WSL instance from your new installation in your second drive ! You can now rinse and repeat the process if you want to try some other distributions and whatnot.
Some more useless words
To conclude, I hope that this new blog post from nowhere has provided you with valuable information. I hope that you enjoyed reading it and (I’m asking too much I think) also gained a clear understanding of what I tried my best to explain.
Thank you for joining me on this short journey with Windows stuff ! More is coming in various subjects and I will do my best to be more consistent with this blog.
Until then, happy reading and see you soon !