VHD vs. partitioned hard drive

byteofthebigapple

What is the difference between a virtual hard drive and a partitioned hard drive. They seem to be created the same way.

Bloogen

A virtual hard drive or VHD is a file format. This file can contain files and folders and the instance of Windows 7 Enterprise can contain an entire operating system that can be booted from.

A hard drive partition is a logical separation of the drive. This allows you to treat one hard disk as if it was multiple disks.

In the this simple explanation it seems that they 'do the same thing', though they can be used for similar things they operate and are essentally completely different. They are created in a similar way as the tools diskpart and Disk Management allow you to manage and create many hard drive related actions including creating and managing VHD's which are 'mounted' as if they were actual hard drives in Windows 7 Enterprise.