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The background

  • My Windows 10 laptop, with a bad battery, lost power during boot, and now cannot successfully boot windows (it tries to fix this with the Automatic Repair utility during startup, but fails every time).
  • I want to boot the laptop into a Ubuntu live environment from a USB stick, and copy some files over from WSL distro to my USB stick.

The problem

  • While I can access my Windows drive and all of my normal Windows files from my Ubuntu live USB, I can't seem to find any of my WSL files.

The Question

  • It seems like I should be able run a command like find . -type d -name "my-directory-in-wsl" and figure out where WSL files live on my drive. I have tried this with no success. Should this work, or do WSL files live outside of the normal filesystem? Is there any hope for recovering these files?
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  • WSL Files tend to be well hidden. Try this: Where are WSL files stored? WSL files are exposed through a network share \\wsl$[distro name], for example my home directory is at \\wsl$\Ubuntu-20.04\home\pawelb. C:\Users\pawelb\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited. ....... solidstudio.io/blog/windows-subsystem-for-linux-explained
    – anon
    Commented Sep 8, 2023 at 16:17
  • 2
    If you are using WSL2 then your files aren't directly on NTFS filesystem but inside the virtual drive VHD file placed in %PROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\<distro package>\LocalState\ext4.vhdx.
    – blami
    Commented Sep 8, 2023 at 16:18
  • Was erroneously closed as a duplicate, which it wasn't because in this case the user is asking how to recover files from within a Ubuntu Live USB boot, not a Windows system.
    – NotTheDr01ds
    Commented Sep 12, 2023 at 19:51

1 Answer 1

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If you are using WSL2 (assumed, since you should find the WSL1 files on the drive with that search), then the entire filesystem for your WSL distribution is in a virtual SDD. As @blami mentioned in the comments, you'll find that in:

%PROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\<distro package>\LocalState\ext4.vhdx

For Ubuntu (the default), the package name will start with "Canonical". So something like:

OldDriveLetter:\Users\<your_old_username>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx

You can also search in OldDriveLetter:\Users\<your_old_username>\AppData\Local\Packages for any ext4.vhdx files.

Copy the ext4.vhdx file off to your USB drive.

As for recovering, the safest/best way would be to use another Windows system with the latest WSL installed and:

  1. Copy the ext4.vhdx back to a location on the Windows system (preferred over trying to access it from the USB drive). For the sake of the example below, we'll assume it's placed in C:\WSL\instances\Recovered.

  2. Import the distribution into that WSL instance:

    wsl --import-in-place RecoveredWSL 
C:\WSL\instances\Recovered\ext4.vhdx

    Note that this wsl command requires the WSL version that is installed from the Microsoft Store (or via wsl --install on the latest Windows releases).

    Feel free to use a different name, of course. Once imported, you can access the distribution via:

    wsl ~ -d RecoveredWSL

    You can also set it as default, so it can simply be launched via wsl:

    wsl --set-default RecoveredWSL

If you really need to access the files from a "real" Ubuntu instance, it may be a bit more complicated, as you'll need to mount that vhdx file into Ubuntu. I haven't done that myself, but some see this answer on Ask Ubuntu for a possibility.

Important: If accessing the ext4.vhdx using this method, please make sure you are working from a secondary copy, as other questions on Ask Ubuntu indicate the possibility of corruption using these tools.

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