Let me first explain why I’m writing this post. I have a MediaCenter PC (running Windows 7 RC1 7100 x32) in my living room which doesn’t have enough disk capacity because the TV recordings take a huge amount of disk space. On the other hand, my workstation (which is always on) has 3 TB of storage. Of course there is the traditional way of assigning a drive letter to a network share, but that has some disadvantages. Some applications are not compatible with network drives or simply refuse to work with it. In my opinion, the best way is to have a ‘virtual drive’ that acts as an internal hard disk for maximum compatibility.
A few weeks ago I read a blog post about mounting a Virtual PC hard disk (VHD) during the Windows 7 setup. It’s possible to install Windows 7 into a VHD container and mount the VHD during the boot. An end-user won’t notice the difference (besides a 3% performance hit), but in fact there is only 1 file on disk.
So this means Windows 7 has improved VHD support. New in Windows 7:
- You can create VHD with a dynamic or a fixed size;
- You can attach/mount the VHD;
So this is what I did:
On my workstation:
- Go to Computer Management (via Administrative Tools);
- Go to Disk Management
- Once the virtual disk service has been initialized, right-click on Disk Management and select Create VHD
- Specify a location for the VHD, enter a size and choose the format. I choose Dynamically expending
- After pressing OK you may hear a sound indicating that some new hardware has been installed. Now look for the new disk in the Disk Management screen
- Right-click on the disk (in the square where it says Disk x/Basic/x GB etc) and choose Initialize Disk and choose a MBR partition style and press OK.
- Right-click on the disk (in the rectangle where it says 300,00 GB unallocated) and choose New Simple Volume and finish the wizard
- When the formatting is done, right-click again on the disk (in the square where it says Disk x/Basic/x GB etc) and choose Detach VHD and press OK
On my Mediacenter:
Go to Computer Management (via Administrative Tools); Go to Disk Management Once the virtual disk service has been initialized, right-click on Disk Management and select Attach VHD Browse to the network location where you created your VHD on your work station and select the VHD-file Press OK Your disk is now mounted and accessible via Explorer as it is a normal physical disk
If you like, you can always move your VHD file to a new location e.g. external hard disk, another computer etc and re-attach the VHD.
Hope this helps,