Question: In Windows 10, you can enable Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. I have done this, but I am struggling to figure out how to access the disk devices. For example, in normal Ubuntu, if I wanted to do a low-level copy of one flash drive to another, I might execute dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4K, but the /dev/sd? devices do not seem to exist in Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. lsblk also does not list any devices. Since dd is installed, I would like to believe there must be a way to access disk devices. Can this be done? How?
Answer: The Windows Subsystem for Linux doesn’t install fully featured Linux kernel, only a stub that allows to run certain types on applications compiled for Linux. Btw. the Bash on Windows or any for of this name is incorrect (Microsoft mistake to name the command bash). I don’t think Microsoft ever dare to add so low level access to the WSL.
However, from my experience what you want to achieve is available in virtual machine. In my case it was Ubuntu installed in VirtualBox. Then you can map USB devices to be available in guest system. That way dd commands are going to work at lowest possible level exactly like on natively installed Linux Distribution.