This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by hardyweb
Trying to Format USB Drive Manually via WSL2
Sometimes, we need to format a USB drive to Btrfs or other Linux-native filesystems, which requires mounting the device as a raw disk inside WSL2 — not just accessing it through /mnt/.
Here’s how I tried to do it:
Open Command Prompt as Administrator and run:
wmic diskdrive list brief
This will list all physical drives (e.g., \.\PHYSICALDRIVE1, \.\PHYSICALDRIVE2, etc.).
Identify which one is your USB device.
Attempt to Mount the Drive in WSL2
Run the following command to mount the raw disk into WSL (replace X with the correct drive number):
wsl --mount \\.\PHYSICALDRIVEx --bare
But I encountered this error:
Error code: Wsl/Service/AttachDisk/0x8007000f
This error may occur if your version of WSL2 doesn’t support raw disk mounting properly. To fix it, update WSL to the latest (preferably pre-release) version:
Still in Command Prompt (Admin):
In cmd prompt ( Administrator mode )
wsl --update
Once the update is done, run it again with –pre-release
wsl --update --pre-release
wsl --restart
then try mount aganin.
Try Mounting Again
**
Final Notes**
Even though the USB drive is accessible via /mnt/ in WSL, that method only provides user-space access, and does not allow formatting to filesystems like Btrfs or ext4. Raw disk mounting (–mount –bare) gives you block-level access needed for tools like mkfs.btrfs.
If this still doesn’t work, consider booting into a Linux distro like Manjaro/Debian and using gparted or CLI tools (mkfs.btrfs, parted) directly from there.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by hardyweb