How in the Tech

Creating a virtual hard drive with Windows 7

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 29, 2010 ⋅ Tags: File Management, Windows 7

Virtual hard drives are not a new technology but are still a fascinating area of attention in computing. The concept got a jolt in the consumer space with Microsoft’s inclusion of the feature natively in Windows 7. What types of advantages would a virtual hard drive bring to the end user? A virtual hard drive can be used very much like a second hard drive – instead of just having your C drive you would also have a D drive as a second storage medium. This can be highly useful as a place to store all your media and documents in a consolidated area. The advantage to this is the backup process is extremely simplified! A virtual hard drive is just a file container on your physical hard drive that can be mounted elsewhere, like your D drive above. Backing up your personal files would be as simple as locating the virtual hard drive file and transferring it to another medium – ideally off site. Intrigued?

The process is kick-started through Computer Management by creating a .VHD file for your  container. Launch Computer Management by right-clicking on Computer off the Start Menu and choosing Manage.

From the Computer Management window select Disk Management from the left-hand menu tree. Initiate the VHD wizard by clicking Action->Create VHD.

Select a directory to store the created VHD file in – this is the location/file you would want to back-up from my usage example above. The file can either be dynamic or fixed in size. While dynamic sounds like the logical choice, you should be aware that virtual hard drive  can only grow to contain the data, it will not shrink to fit data in the future.

Back in the Disk Management window you should see the newly created virtual drive with the unallocated space matching your selection above. Before the virtual hard drive can be used it must be initialized.  Right-click on the disk and choose Initialize Disk.

The disk in Disk Management should change from being not initialized to online for it’s status. Now we must place a filesystem on the drive before it can be written to. Right-click on the unallocated space again and choose New Simple Volume.

Follow the steps in the New Simple Volume Wizard by defining the size of the file system, the file system type, and the drive letter to mount the volume to. I chose to use the entire volume, formatted as NTFS, and mounted as V.

Your new volume V should be visible in Disk Management as well as the Hard Disk area of My Computer. It is now available to use however you saw fit.

Virtual hard drives are a great way to stay organized and efficient but the possibilities don’t end there. Windows 7 has the ability to boot from VHD files which can open up a myriad of creative uses – what do you have in mind?