How to Create a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) in Windows 8/7

Have you ever wished you had an extra hard drive or partition to setup a dual-boot or multi-boot operating system? You can shrink your existing partition to create a new partition but it always carries some risk of data loss. Beginning with Windows 7, you can create a virtual hard drive (VHD) which acts as a separate hard drive in your computer.

The virtual hard drive (VHD) is stored as a .vhd file on your physical disk. By mounting a virtual hard drive, you can easily copy files to and from the virtual disk. Additionally, Windows 7 and Windows 8 can be configured to boot from a VHD. In this tutorial we’ll go through the steps of creating a virtual hard drive (VHD) in Windows 8/7.

How to Create a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) in Windows 8/7?

1. Press the Windows + R key combination to bring up a Run box, type compmgmt.msc and hit Enter.

2. The Computer Management dialog opens, click Disk Management in the left pane of the window and wait until you see all currently installed disks in the right pane.
3. Right-click Disk Management and then select Create VHD.

4. Click Browse to choose the location where you want your VHD stored, and give it a descriptive name. Choose the size you want it to be, and select dynamic or a fixed. If you want the disk to expand in size as you add files to it, then pick Dynamically expanding. Check Fixed size if you want a specific size and for it to stay that way. Click OK.

5. You will see the virtual hard drive listed as unallocated space in Disk Management. Right click on the virtual hard drive and select Initialize Disk.

6. Press OK in the Initialize Disk box.

7. Now it is time to create a volume by right-clicking the unallocated space and select New Simple Volume.

8. The New Simple Volume Wizard starts up and just press Next until the wizard is complete.

9. Now the new virtual disk is ready to be used, just like any other disk. You can see the virtual hard drive on your computer.