Create+a+Virtual+Hard+Drive+in+Windows+7


 * How to Create a Virtual Hard Drive in Windows 7 **

Windows 7, Microsoft's latest Windows release is the smoothest operating system. It has an easy to learn user interface that looks marvellous and does the job equally well.

This has made Windows 7 a huge success over any earlier version of Windows, especially the very popular Windows XP.

Windows 7 runs quite fast and is a lot faster than Windows Vista. A new feature of Windows 7 is the ability in creating a virtual drive.


 * Virtual Hard Drives **

Virtual Hard Drive is a feature in Windows 7 that allows us to create a virtual hard drive partition at any location on your computer without actually creating a new partition. Below will illustrate the need for a virtual hard drive with this simple scenario.

At times, we need hard drives to store data, and our original drive allocated for that data has reached its limit of free space. .



Windows 7 requires that a Virtual Hard Drive should be at least of 3 MB in size. It behaves like just another logical drive in Windows, the difference being that it completely remains inside another partition and does not need you to partition your hard disk. The disk has a format of .VHD. The first section here deals with creating the virtual drive and the second, with formatting it and putting it to use.


 * Creating a Virtual Hard Drive **

Step 1: Go to the **Start** Menu, click on it and then move your mouse over to the **Computer** icon.

Step 2: Right Click on **Computer** and select the **Manage** option.



Step 3: This takes you to a management window that has various tools and utilities to manage Windows. You are interested in the Disk Management option that allows us to manage the storage devices like hard drives, DVD drives and thumb drives connected to out computers.



Clicking on **Disk Management** will take you to a page, which loads the disk drives on your computer. This might take some time to load completely. You will get a window with a **Connecting to Virtual Disk Service…** message.

Eventually, you get a window like this that shows all your drives.



Step 4: Next, you create a VHD on a disk drive by going to :-
 * Action > Create ** VHD as shown in the next step.



Step 5: In the Window that appears, click on **Browse** and select the hard drive partition where you want your virtual drive to reside. The selected drive should have as much of free space as you need for your virtual drive.

In the second box, enter the size of the partition you will create. In the arrows labeled 1 and 2, select :-
 * Dynamically Expanding ** for a drive that is not of a fixed size and **Fixed Size** for a fixed size partition.



After making the required preferences, here is how your Virtual Drive settings may look.

Click on **OK** to confirm, and wait for Windows to setup your drive. After the drive has been setup, you will get a notification message saying,



This has created your virtual disk. However, to use it, you will need to format it with Windows.

**Initializing a Virtual Hard Drive**

Step 1: Right click on the area given by the arrow and click on **Initialize Disk**.



In the Window that appears, you will see options to initialize it. Selecting the **MBR** option makes this partition a part of the Windows MBR. Thus, it will be identified at boot time as a logical partition and will load automatically on each restart. Click on **OK**. Now, the disk is online.



Step 2: Right click on the unallocated disk shown by the arrow and click on **New Simple Volume**.



In the new wizard that appears, click on the **Next** button all the way. Windows will format the logical partition and after the format, you will get an autoplay window identifying the new partition.



The new partition shows up on your My Computer as well and behaves like just another partition.

**Removing the Virtual Hard Drive**

To remove the virtual hard drive, bring the drive Offline and then **Detach VHD** as shown in the screenshots.



Now, you will get a confirmation window that allows you to delete the drive along with the detach operation.

Check the box, :- This deletes the virtual hard disk that you have selected for deletion.
 * Delete the virtual hard disk file after removing the disk ** and click **OK**.

Now, you can create and use and remove virtual drives with ease on your Windows installation using this guide.