Moving WSL to Another Drive

Sometimes you need to move your WSL installation to another drive. Maybe you’re running out of space on your current drive, or you just want to move it to a faster drive. Whatever the reason, it’s simple as using several builtin commands from WSL. For this example, I’ll be moving my Ubuntu-22.04 installation from my C: drive to my D: drive.

Steps

List current installations in cmd or windows powershell

wsl --list -v

Output:

PS C:\Users\lim> wsl --list -v
  NAME                   STATE           VERSION
* Ubuntu-22.04           Running         2
  docker-desktop         Stopped         2
  docker-desktop-data    Stopped         2

Terminate the WSL instance you would like to remove. In this case, I’ll be terminating Ubuntu-22.04.

wsl -t Ubuntu-22.04

Export the WSL instance to a tar file using the export command. In this case, I’ll be exporting Ubuntu-22.04 to D:\wsl_export\ubuntu-ex.tar.
Before that, create and cd into the directory you want to export the tar file to! I’ve tried using the aboslute path for the tar file, but it didn’t work.
```
cd D:\wsl_export
```
Then run the following command as a regular (non-admin) user.
```
wsl --export Ubuntu-22.04 .\ubuntu-ex.tar
```
Output:
```
PS D:\wsl_export> wsl --export Ubuntu-22.04 .\ubuntu-ex.tar
The operation completed successfully.
```
Unregister the old Ubuntu instance.
```
wsl --unregister Ubuntu-22.04
```

Import the instance to a new location using the import command. In this case, I’ll be importing ubuntu-ex.tar to D:\wsl_import\ubuntu. (This time I’ll be using the absolute path because it works for me, try cd into the directory you want to import the tar file to if it doesn’t work.)

wsl --import Ubuntu-22.04 "D:\wsl_import\ubuntu" "D:\wsl_export\ubuntu-ex.tar"

Output:

PS D:\wsl_import> wsl --import Ubuntu-22.04 "D:\wsl_import\ubuntu"  "D:\wsl_export\ubuntu-ex.tar"
Import in progress, this may take a few minutes.
Windows Subsystem for Linux Distributions:
docker-desktop (Default)
Ubuntu-22.04
docker-desktop-data

Set the new import as default for WSL
```
wsl --setdefault Ubuntu-22.04
```
Set default user for the new import
I used the method 1 from here and modified the config in /etc/wsl.conf from my Ubuntu 22.04 installation.
Start the Ubuntu 22.04 instance and run the following commands.
```
vi /etc/wsl.conf
```
Then modify the user section to:
```
[user]
default=<your-default-username>
```
:wq to save and quit
Then stop the instance from cmd or powershell.
```
wsl --terminate Ubuntu-22.04
```
When you restart the instance, it should be using the default user you set.
* Feel free to try out the other methods if this doesn’t work for you.

Voila!

Now you have successfully moved your WSL installation to another drive. Happy coding!

Steps#

Voila!#

Steps

Voila!