Now that the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has been released to the masses in Windows 10 Anniversary Update and you have have installed the feature and had a play, What happens if you want to start from scratch and reset everything to a fresh state? This is something we often do in IT, especially when troubleshooting an issue. Instead of going into Programs & Features in Control Panel there is a very quick command you can run to perform the reset.
lxrun /uninstall
This will uninstall the WSL environment from your workstation. Combine it with:
lxrun /install
to reinstall the WSL environment and you are all reset.
You can also set root as the default user for WSL at the install phase with the following switch:
lxrun /install /y
Alternatively, you can define your own user at install with:
lxrun /install /setdefaultuser <username> /y
Note: if you omit the /y switch when defining your own username then you will be prompted to set a password for said user.
Super simple stuff! Go forth and get knee deep in the world of Linux, Windows Administrators
hey i get this error code when i want to installing bash on windows
“Error: 0x80070091”
any sugestion?
thanks
I have the same error code.
what kind of shell accepts the lxrun command? Not windows powershell (native Windows) not cmd.exe. I can’t convince wsl I have installed a distro with the store or WSL. (which is why I want to get rid of WSL & reinstall it.) So I have no access to bash.
Hey Jay,
It seems you have picked up on the age of this post in that lxrun is a now depreciated command associated with the WSL version 1 environment. See here for more:
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/425
With WSL version 2, a remove and readd of the Windows feature would net the desired result
A quick suggests the PowerShell equivalent would be:
Remove-WindowsFeature Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
Thanks for the heads up on the age of the post. I had foolishly ignored it. I have since removed the wsl feature on win 10, moved to Win 11 and requested WSL there. I now have different issues (with Debian)