CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windows-subsystem-for-linux
Melvin Abraham
Melvin Abraham

Reputation: 3036

"Windows Subsystem for Linux has no installed distributions" even though 'Ubuntu' is installed

I recently moved my wsl directory to another drive due to low storage in C: drive. As per the answer provided in this StackOverflow post, I used lxrunoffline tool and moved my Ubuntu distribution to another drive (E:\wsl in my case). As soon as the distribution was moved successfully, I ran wsl to test and it worked like a charm.

Everything went fine until one day I accidentally renamed the E:\wsl folder to something else. Well, as expected, wsl didn't work. Then, I reverted back to the name wsl and expected it to work but to my surprise, it didn't find any installed distribution after that even though it's installed... 😕

E:> wsl
Windows Subsystem for Linux has no installed distributions.
Distributions can be installed by visiting the Microsoft Store:
https://aka.ms/wslstore

Ubuntu installed

Is there any way to revert back to the old directory or make wsl point to a manual location?

EDIT: I don't want to reset Ubuntu as I want to retain the installed packages and preferences...

Upvotes: 5

Views: 11265

Answers (1)

Melvin Abraham
Melvin Abraham

Reputation: 3036

Well, I finally found a solution to this problem. 😊

This is as simple as registering the distribution using lxrunoffline tool using the rg or register command.

E:\LxRunOffline\LxRunOffline-v3.3.3>lxrunoffline rg
[ERROR] the option '-d' is required but missing

Options:
  -n arg                Name of the distribution
  -d arg                The directory containing the distribution.
  -c arg                The config file to use. This argument is optional.

After running the register command, I was able to start wsl as usual. But that would log you in as a "root" user and would thus start in "/root" directory. I ran the following command to start wsl as different user (this is for Ubuntu):

ubuntu config --default-user <user-name>

Upvotes: 2

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