External HDD on bash on ubuntu on windows [closed]

Question

How do I access an external hard drive through bash-on-Ubuntu-on-windows. It doesn't seem to appear in either /media, /mnt or /dev, which seem the common places that people say to look for them in Ubuntu systems.

Note: the hard drive is HFS+ formatted: I use Paragon's HFS+ for windows and have already done an apt-get install hfsprogs which I think should allow the Linux part to read the HFS+ format. I have also tried with normal USB sticks, no of which seemed to appear anywhere.

The drive does appear in /cygdrive in cygwin, but when I navigate to cygdrive in bash it doesn't appear. Clearly it is not properly mounted there, but is some form of symbolical link that bash cannot see.

I'm not really sure if this is a Linux or a Windows issue, but there doesn't seem to be anything from Microsoft about it, though I realise it is early days for them.

Answer 1

The Ubuntu on Windows on the current build (Build 14393, a.k.a. anniversary update) doesn't support accessing external drive. This feature is on their backlog for future consideration.

Source: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-console-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windo/suggestions/13355724-unable-to-access-usb-devices-from-bash

Edit: Mounting removable drives are supported since Build 16176. [1][2]

1. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2017/04/18/file-system-improvements-to-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux/
2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/44001783/643011
3. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk