Steps to Create A Virtual Hard Disk On Windows 10

We all have physical hard disk installed on our machines. But what is a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)? And for what purpose it is useful? It is the most common question for a normal PC user. A virtual hard disk is nothing but an imaginary hard disk which purposely designed for virtual machines. A virtual machine can run any operating system inside a PC. For example, you are using a Windows-based machine, but you want to run Linux or Mac OS, without impacting the main operating system on your PC, you can virtually run the second operating system. It is just like a dream in a dream in Inception movie.

Virtual Hard Disks just work like physical hard disks, they have same directory structure designed to have files and folders. Recently, Microsoft has launched a new and easy feature to create a Virtual Hard Disk easily on Windows. If you are on a plan to run a second OS on your PC, then VHD is a must have to get started.

Steps to Create A Virtual Hard Disk On Windows 10

1. First, open Administrative Tools from the Windows 10 search bar. Or you can directly launch the Device Management by right-clicking on This PC icon > Manage.
2. Now right click on the ‘Disk Management’ under Storage to view available options.
3. Here, you will see an option called “create VHD“.
4. Now, click on that option to create a Virtual Hard Disk on your PC.
5. Once you click, you will see a Window to create a new VHD with a list of options.
6. Here, you have to select the location for your new VHD and allocate some disk space to create. By default, it creates a minimum size VHD, if you want more space you can allocate manually by entering the disk size in MB’s.
   Your PC must have 1 GB free space on the drive in which you have stored the VHD folder.
7. Now choose the option Dynamically expanding or Fixed size as the virtual hard disk type and click on the OK button.
8. After doing above steps. you will find a VHD ready on your PC.
9. Now you have to initialize the disk before Logical Dik Manager can access it.
10. Right click on it and choose the option Initialize. This helps you to create new volumes on the disk.

That’s it. Now you have successfully created a new Virtual Hard Disk on Windows. You can use this virtual hard disk to install the secondary OS on the same PC. You do not have to use the virtual machine applications like VirtualBox in order to create and start using the virtual hard disk. Thanks to Microsoft who made it extremely simple to creat and manage the VHDs in Windows.

Please do comment your view about the Virtual Hard Disk Drives. Are they helpful? Did you find any unique ways to use the virtual drives? Share it with us. Also, if you have any question regarding the topic, feel free to ask in the following comment section.