Manage virtual disks with Windows 7 built-in features

        I believe many of my friends know that the VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file format is an image file specially designed for Virtual PC, Virtual Server 2005, and Hyper-V virtual machines. Virtual PC 2007 has provided a VHD image format. Support, or we can use WinMount3 to mount a VHD file as a virtual disk.

However, if you have already used Windows 7, you can use its built-in disk management function to directly mount VHD files, or even create a virtual disk by hand. This is undoubtedly simpler and the operation is very simple. Here are two examples to illustrate the relevant steps:

Example 1: Mounting a VHD file

Using Windows 7 to mount a virtual disk file in VHD format is not only easier to operate, but also To save the trouble of installing WinMount3, the specific steps are as follows:

Step 1: Go to the Control Panel and open the “Computer Management” window. If you have already set the Display Computer icon on the desktop, you can right click and select “ Manage" opens the window.

Step 2: Select “Storage” from the left navigation pane, right click on “Disk Management” under it, as shown in Figure 1, select “Attach VHD” from the shortcut menu, then A dialog box will pop up asking for the path where the VHD file is located. Click the “Browse” button to specify it.


Figure 1 Windows 7 mount VHD virtual disk file format
Step 3:

After completing the above settings, click "OK" button to close the dialog After returning to the disk management window, as shown in Figure 2, we can see that there is a disk "Disk2" that has not been initialized (the name here depends on the local computer's hard disk loading), which is the mounted. The virtual disk, at the same time the disk auto-run function will also pop up the auto play window, select "Open folder to vIEw files" to access the contents.



Figure 2 Windows 7 loaded in the virtual disk
next operation much easier, returned Explorer window to access just the mounted virtual disk, and There is no difference in operating a local disk.

Instance 2: Create Virtual Disk

Go into the Disk Manager window, select “Disk Management” from the left pane, right click and select “Create” from the shortcut menu. VHD", the "Create and Attach Virtual Hard Disk" dialog box will pop up. Specify the path where the virtual disk file is located here. Specify a disk root directory with a large available space. As for the virtual disk, the file name can be arbitrarily selected, just like other virtual machine tools. Here also need to set the size of the virtual disk, the drop-down list box provides three options: MB, GB, TB, etc., for example, set to 2GB (see Figure 3), you can get a new virtual disk after confirmation.


Figure 3 Windows7 create a new virtual disk

return to the Disk Management window, you can see right pane adds a new Disk3 disk, as 4, right click on Disk3, select "Initialize Disk" from the shortcut menu to initialize, after completion, you also need to right-click and select "New Simpple Volume" to complete the assignment of drive letter, perform formatting, etc., then you can use it as a local The disk is in normal use.


see Figure 4 Windows 7 disk

In either case, when the virtual disk is no longer needed, you can still enter the newly created Disk Management window, Select the corresponding virtual disk from the right pane, right-click and select "Detach VHD". The dialog box shown in Figure 5 will pop up. Check the "Delete the virtual hard disk file after removing the disk" check box. At the same time, when the virtual disk is unmounted, the corresponding file is deleted at the same time. Finally, clicking the "OK" button can successfully clear the virtual disk. Is it convenient?


Figure 5 delete virtual disk in Windows7