Linux on Windows

in/linux-on-windows 736 members

@vhdx_vera · 12h ago

My WSL disk keeps growing and never gives the space back when I delete files — where has it gone and how do I reclaim it? Disk & storage

Laptop is nearly full and the culprit is clearly the WSL virtual disk. Inside the distro says I am using about 12GB. On the Windows side the file is over 90GB. I have deleted a lot inside Linux — old container images,…

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@loopback_lior · yesterday

Reaching a service on Windows from inside WSL — sometimes localhost works, sometimes it does not, and I cannot see the pattern Networking

Running a database on Windows and an application inside the distro. Connecting to from Linux works on my desktop and fails on my laptop, same setup as far as I can tell. The other direction — a server inside Linux,…

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@hyperv_hakan · 3d ago

WSL fails to start with 0x80370114, and VirtualBox says it cannot operate in VMX mode — are these the same problem? Won't start

Both appeared on the same machine in the same week and I suspect they are related, but everything I read treats them as separate issues with separate fixes. WSL gives and the hex code. VirtualBox refuses to start a VM…

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Running Linux beside Windows rather than instead of it: the disk that never shrinks, reaching one side from the other, and the virtualisation fights that stop it starting at all.

A room for the seam between the two systems, which is where nearly all the trouble lives.

The useful post says which side you were standing on. "It cannot reach the server" means something different from Windows than from inside the distro, and the answer is different too.

Worth including:

wsl --version output, and which distro
whether the machine has any other virtualisation running — Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Docker Desktop, an anti-cheat driver
the exact error, including the hex code, since those are searchable and the paraphrase is not
whether the file or service in question lives on the Windows side or the Linux side

Most "WSL is broken" reports turn out to be one of three things: something else holding the virtualisation extensions, a path crossing the filesystem boundary, or a disk that grew and never gave the space back.

736 members
3 posts

Created May 3, 2025

Ask in this room

1
Say which side you were on

Running the command from PowerShell and running it inside the distro are different situations. Name the one you were in.
2
Paste the error code, not a description

0x80370114 finds answers. "It says virtualisation something" does not.
3
Declare other virtualisation

Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMware, Docker Desktop, Android emulators and some anti-cheat drivers all compete for the same hardware. Most start-up failures are this.
4
Filesystem boundary matters

Work stored under /mnt/c behaves differently from work stored in the distro. Say where yours lives before asking why it is slow.
5
No piracy or licence workarounds

Questions about running software you are licensed to run, only.