Processing fstab with mount -a failed

I use Windows 11 as operating system. Its build number is: 22000.348

I installed Debian from store, and then I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux Preview.

WSL version is: 2

Debian runs correctly and there is no problem with it. But when I run Windows Subsystem for Linux Preview application, this error occurs:

Processing fstab with mount -a failed.

[process exited with code 1 (0x00000001)]

• Why is this happening?
• How Can I prevent this?
• What Windows Subsystem for Linux application does?

Solution 1:

From the comments, it sounds like this may be due to a bug of some sort in the Preview version of WSL installed from the Store.

Ultimately, the problem turned out to be that one of the Docker WSL instances became the "default" for WSL. So running the "Debian" distribution specifically would work. Running the WSL application (which runs wsl.exe),however, was attempting to start the docker image, which isn't meant to be accessed directly (and was resulting in the fstab error).

This was found via wsl -l -v showing the Docker image as default.

The solution was to use:

wsl -s Debian

to set the default distribution.