On 7/27/22 13:06, Albretch Mueller wrote:
I googled: "mount solid state drive" Linux, and I got very few hits (like 16?) which were mostly totally irrelevant. I got a laptop with Windows installed on which I installed WSLg. WIndows and WSLg both seem to detect the SSD just fine, but in ways that are not totally clear to me. What I care about is using the SSD for my data intensive code in Linux, but when I boot that computer with Debian live I can't see the SSD. What could be going on? lbrtchx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux#WSL_2"The distribution installation resides inside an ext4-formatted filesystem inside a virtual disk, and the host file system is transparently accessible through the 9P protocol,[54] similarly to other virtual machine technologies like QEMU."
Use Windows Backup and Restore to create a system image and to backup your Windows data to an external HDD.
Use Windows RecoveryDrive to create a USB recovery drive.Figuring out how to mount the WSL ext4 filesystem using Debian Live looks to be non-trivial. Mounting NTFS is easy. Mounting ext4 is easy. But, I do not know what format Microsoft uses for the WSL virtual disk; so, I do not know if Debian can open it. And, unless you can find known good commands, fumbling around with incorrect commands could corrupt the WSL filesystem, the WSL virtual disk, the Windows C: filesystem, and/or the SSD partitioning scheme.
Dual-boot comes to mind; but I had bad experiences with dual-boot and avoid it.
I would boot Windows, shrink the C: partition to create free space, shut down Windows, boot Debian Live, create a new partition in the free space (partitioning scheme should be GPT), and create a new ext4 filesystem in the new partition. You should then be able to mount the new ext4 filesystem using WSL, Debian Live, or any other live OS that supports GPT and ext4.
David