Creating a VHD

DerekAustin26

Do you have to have unallocated space on your disk in order to create a VHD?

I've read the books and it says to just right click disk management and select "Create VHD" and so forth from there. But it doesnt ever say if there has to be unallocated space or not.

Anyone know?

Akaricloud

DerekAustin26 wrote: »

Do you have to have unallocated space on your disk in order to create a VHD?

I've read the books and it says to just right click disk management and select "Create VHD" and so forth from there. But it doesnt ever say if there has to be unallocated space or not.

Anyone know?

a VHD is a file. So essentially it's just creating a .VHD file on a pre-existing partition and then mounts it as another drive.

With that being said it needs to be created on a logical drive and you can either allocate all of the space at once by selecting fixed or have it dynamically expand as needed by selecting that during creation. If you specify 20gb of fixed space for it then it'll create a 20gb .VHD file.

Do you not have a Windows 7 machine to try this stuff on yourself?

DerekAustin26

I'm going to be doing it tonight on my Windows 7 machine. Just thought I'd ask prior to testing it out.

pzero

You can use either Diskpart (CLI) or Disk Management (GUI) to create the VHD's.

If your running W7 Ultimate/Enterprise or Server 2008 R2 you can make use of "Boot from VHD" by using BCDEdit.