Accessing removable media in Bash on Windows
Good news, it is now possible to mount USB media (including formatted as FAT) and network shares with drvfs on Windows 10:
Mount removable media: (e.g. D:)
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/d
$ sudo mount -t drvfs D: /mnt/d
To safely unmount
$ sudo umount /mnt/d
You can also mount network shares without smbfs:
$ sudo mount -t drvfs '\\server\share' /mnt/share
You need at least Build 16176 so you might have to opt-in to the Windows Insider programm and then update Windows. Source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2017/04/18/file-system-improvements-to-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux/
Is there a way to access removable media from within Bash on Windows?
Update:
Apparently it is now possible starting from Windows 10 Build 16176.
See https://superuser.com/a/1209701/337631.
No.
At the moment there are limitations on what drives are mounted:
In order for a drive to show up under /mnt/ it must meet the following criteria:
- The drive must be a fixed drive
- The drive must be formatted to NTFS.
This has been raised as an issue: Drives other than C: are not mounted in /mnt #1079. It is still marked as "Open".
To facilitate interoperability with Windows, WSL uses the DrvFs file system. WSL automatically mounts all fixed drives with supported file systems under /mnt, such as /mnt/c, /mnt/d, etc. Currently, only NTFS and ReFS volumes are supported.
Source WSL File System Support
Further Reading
- WSL File System Support