Expanding the WSL virtual hard drive

Published 2024-02-12.
Time to read: 1 minutes.

This page is part of the posts collection, categorized under WSL.

I ran out of room on my WSL2 virtual hard drive. Microsoft’s instructions worked perfectly to increase the virtual drive size.

Shut Down WSL

The following command work from WSL bash, and cmd, and PowerShell:

Shell

$ wsl.exe --shutdown

Expand VHD With Diskpart

The virtual disk was in %LocalAppData%\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx

Open a cmd.exe window with admininstrator privileges and run diskpart.

diskpart

DISKPART> Select vdisk file="%LocalAppData%\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx"

DISKPART> detail vdisk
Device type ID: 0 (Unknown)
Vendor ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} (Unknown)
State: Added
Virtual size:  256 GB
Physical size:  247 GB
Filename: C:\Users\Mike Slinn\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx
Is Child: No
Parent Filename:
Associated disk#: Not found.

The virtual disk was 256 GB (256,000 MB). I want it to be twice as big: 512,000 MB.

diskpart (continued)

DISKPART> expand vdisk maximum=512000

100 percent completed

DiskPart successfully expanded the virtual disk file. 
DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

Restart WSL and Run resize2fs

Now I restarted WSL from a cmd window. The following command work from WSL bash, and cmd, and PowerShell:

cmd.exe

$ wsl.exe

Now tell Linux to use all available space:

Shell

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/sdc 512000M
resize2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Filesystem at /dev/sdc is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old_desc_blocks = 32, new_desc_blocks = 63
The filesystem on /dev/sdc is now 131072000 (4k) blocks long.

😁

Done!