Accessing windows drives from inside Ubuntu Container

Docker Desktop
1

I am running Windows Docker Desktop 27.2.0 on a Windows 11 Laptop

I am using docker to run an ubuntu container interactivly using my PC Terminal.

Is there some way to access my windows drives from ubuntu prompt?

I specificaly want to pull a text file from my a secondary drive on my laptop or from an attached usb thumb drive.

In the past I had a stand alone Ubuntu desktop pc and plugging the thumb drive in made it available in the file manager.

I understand this may not be possible.

2

Most your questions can be answered in the first few pages of the Docker documentation, you should read them

3

Read and Understand at this time are mutualy exclusive concepts. I am only in docker because my previous Ubuntu server died (the PSU siring started emiting magic smoke)

I have as you suggested visiting the Docker Documentation and this is just too much to take on board.

I have visited YouTube for tutorial answers (my preferred method) So far all of these start with a massive preamble on why docker is containerisation and why this is a good idea.

All I want is a quick and dirty way to look at a drive.

In due course spending a week or so reading the documentation will almost certainly happen.

BTW Thanks for the response.

4

I have also linked the part of the documentation addressing mounting paths from the host machine onto containers - Volumes

For example: docker run -v /host/path:/container/path ubuntu
This would mount the /host/path directory/file onto the path /container/path within the container

5

To start from the beginning, when you are using a container you don’t have to “plug” the USB device to the container. As @deanayalon suggested, you normally plug the usb device to the host and mount the folder on the drive to the container.

The tricky part is that when you are using Docker Desktop, you are using a virtual machine. It would not be a problem as the WSL2 backend let’s you access the host filesystem, but on my machine, it looks like not to the USB device. So when I mount a file from the host, the folder in the container is empty. I tried checking what Docker Desktop saw actually and it created the “container” folder I mounted from the USB drive, inside Docker Desktop possibly because it knew from the definition that it should be the source path, but the virtual machine itself knows nothing about the actual source.

I don’t use Dcoker Desktop on Windows often or WSL2, but I expected WSL to see the USB drive too after mounting it on Windows, but it didn’t happen. Maybe because WSL needs USBIPD to access USB devices

But I could not make it work to access the USB device in WSL2, not to mention Docker Desktop.