Rescuing a Windows Dynamic Disk Over USB with WSL2 and USB/IP
Windows refused to bring an old dynamic disk online over USB. Handing the raw USB device to WSL2's Linux kernel with usbipd-win got every file back.
I pulled a 1 TB NVMe out of an old Windows box, dropped it in a USB enclosure and plugged it in. Windows showed nothing.
No drive letter, no “initialize this disk” prompt, nothing in Explorer. Disk Management listed it as Invalid. The
enclosure’s booklet said to “bring the disk online”, which silently did nothing. The data was completely intact. Windows
was refusing on policy grounds, not because anything was broken. Getting it back meant going around the Windows…
