Adapted community discussion: Paraphrased and condensed from an anonymized public OpenClaw Discord support conversation from August 2026. Technical guidance was reviewed for OpenClaw 2026.9.3.
My agent cannot see the Windows Documents folder even though I granted read access. Inside the WSL instance, /mnt/c is empty, so the Windows drive does not appear to be mounted at all. Is this an OpenClaw permission problem or a WSL setup problem?
This is runtime visibility before OpenClaw permissions. An ACL cannot expose a path that the WSL distro has not mounted. Check from the same distro and user that runs the Gateway:
id
ls -la /mnt /mnt/c
mountpoint /mnt/c
mount | grep -i drvfs
From PowerShell, wsl -l -v confirms the distro name and state. If /mnt/c is not mounted, inspect /etc/wsl.conf. Merge these settings into the existing file rather than replacing unrelated sections:
[automount]
enabled=true
root=/mnt/
Then terminate and relaunch that distro so WSL applies the change. wsl --mount is not the normal fix for the Windows C drive. If the shell can read /mnt/c but the agent cannot, investigate sandbox and workspace-only file policy separately.
What is the default sudo password for the WSL instance that OpenClaw created? I need to inspect its mount configuration.
There is no default sudo password for the app-created OpenClawGateway distro. Start a root shell from PowerShell instead, make the automount edit described above, and then restart the distro:
wsl.exe -d OpenClawGateway --user root -- bash
Normal Gateway commands should still run as the regular OpenClaw user.
That fixed it. After enabling automount with /mnt/ as the root and restarting the instance, the agent could see my Windows folders.
Good. Be aware that enabling Windows-drive automount deliberately broadens what the managed distro can see. Keep OpenClaw file access and sandbox policy as narrow as your workflow permits, and expose only the folders the agent genuinely needs. Current reference: sandbox and tool policy.