In this video I won't explain what a Virtual Hard Drive really is. I will simply show you how to create one using Disk Management tool in Win 7
So, to get started we have to open
Disk Management tool.
I will go to my computer and then click Manage
Then I will go to Disk Management tool
and notice that currently we only have one partition on our system, which is the C: drive.
To create new
Virtual Hard Drive
we can go to Actions
and select "Create VHD"
We need to specify the location to which we will save our VHD file.
In our case this will be
C: drive
and we will type a file name which will be
UserData.vhd, and we will click on Save.
We also need to specify the hard disk size, which will be
256 MB in our case.
Disk format will be "Fixed size".
And we will click OK.
Notice that we have a new disk on our system now, and notice that it is unallocated.
We have to initialize it before we can use it. To do that I will right-click Disk 1, and select "Initialize Disk"
We will use default settings for this, so let's click OK.
Notice now that our disk is now "Basic".
That means that we can create simple volumes on it. So, I will right-click unallocated space on it, and select "New Simple Volume".
The wizard will appear. Let's click Next.
We will use the maximum size for our volume. Click Next.
Drive letter for our virtual hard disk will be E.
We will format it with NTFS file system.
Label will be
UserData. And we will perform a quick format.
Notice that we have a new volume on our system now.
And we can open our new virtual hard disk in Windows Explorer!
Notice that Disk Management tool automatically attached it to our system.
Notice that we have two volumes now on our computer.
Everything that we do
on this E: drive
will be saved
in this UserData.vhd file, which is file used to create our virutal hard disk
on this system. And that's it. We can use our Virtual Hard Disk now.
If we don't want to use it on this system any more, we can also detach it.
To do that we can go to Disk Management tool again. Click on Disk 1, which is our
virtual hard disk, and click on "Detach VHD" option.
If we want to use this virtual hard disk on another system, we shouldn't select this option,
as it will delete virtual hard disk file from our hard disk.
So, be careful here.
Let's click OK.
And that's it. The Virtual Hard Disk is no longer attached to our system, and we can
copy this file to another system and attach it as well.
