All the files are stored in a ext4.vhd files in the installation directory, which you can’t mount directly onto windows as it is in ext4 (obv)
There’s two ways to change the location of the above mentioned vhd file the official, tedious way and an unofficial quick and dirty way
The official tedious way
- Export the distro to a location with
wsl.exe --export <Distro> <FileName>from CMD/PowerShell - Import the distro to a different location with
wsl.exe --import <Distro> <InstallLocation> <FileName> [Options]
The problems with this is it’s quite time consuming and after you do this, pray that it exported and imported several gigabytes worth of thousands of files without any problems
The quick and dirty way
This involes an unofficial opensource WSL manager called lxrunoffline
To install it (takes like a min at max) read through the instructions by the dev here
If you installed it by manually downloading the binaries from the release page, make sure to install it to a directory in PATH, like C:\Windows
Now the process is simple as lxrunoffline move -n <distroname> -d <destination-folder>
For example lxrunoffline move -n Ubuntu-20.04 -d G:\wsl\
Hope I helped
Edit: typo