Windows 10: Creating Virtual Hard Disks - VHD

I have a TB to choose from and I Made it 1,000,000,000,000,000TB to see if it was a 1,000YB which I went online to see how much it was and it said 1000 that is 1,000 YB but on my computer, after it was formatting it said 1024.98 GB and then I thought to my self boy that didn't work because I looked it up in windows explorer and it said 0.99 GB then I thought like wow that broke the fact that even if how much of a TB I can get to it wont make it a YB or a ZB depending on how much I make it. Am I right or why didn't it work for me?

:)

 

Unable to create virtual hard drive

Hi,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.



As you are trying to create a virtual machine, you can try creating a virtual hard disk manually by using PowerShell command and check if that helps.



Please follow the steps mentioned below to create virtual hard disk.

• Type PowerShell in the Windows start menu.
  
• Right click on PowerShell and select run as administrator.
  
• Please enter this command New-VHD "C:\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines\Drive1.vhdx" –size 60GB –dynamic
  and hit enter key. (Note: you can change the size of the virtual hard drive according to your requirement)
  
• Open Disk Management.
  
• Click on Action and select
  Attach VHD.​
  
• Click on Browser and navigate to the location
  C:\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines and select drive1 and click on
  Open.​
  
• Click on OK.​
  
• Now, right click on Disk 1 and select
  Initialize Disk.​
  
• Select the Type of partition you want to use and click on
  OK.​
  
• Now, right click on unallocated space and click on
  New Simple Volume.​
  
• Follow the on-screen instructions to assign a
  drive letter.
  

If the issue persists, I suggest you to post your query in TechNet
forums, where we have support professionals who are well equipped with the knowledge to create virtual machines.



Hope it helps.

Noor Azam S

Microsoft Community - Moderator

 

Compacting virtual hard disks

We must have totally different working methods

Let's see what I told to be my workflow, and check how that works in reality. Example W10 x64 VM is one I have used for ESDtoISO and UUPtoISO testing, a clean installed build 15048 with no additional software installed, upgraded several times to builds 15055, 15058, 15060 and 15061, always restored back to clean 15048. This has of course caused the VHD size to grow to multiple times what really is needed.

After the above, checking file sizes. Macrium image was made when the original 64 GB dynamically expanding VHD was 34.5 GB:




Macrium image size just under 5 GB:

After restoring Macrium image to a new dynamically expanding VHD, file size is 9.3 GB. Over two thirds smaller than original one:




The same as seen by File Explorer, yellow highlight is the original VHD, start situation, and green highlight the new VHD where Macrium image from old VHD was restored. Old VHD can now be deleted, net storage save savings over 25 GB in this example case:




(Notice that VHD has already grown over 0.5 GB since the previous screenshot a few minutes earlier. This is because in previous screenshot VM was not started yet after restoring the image.)
This of course is all logical, happens every time.

 

VHD to virtual PC

What does it mean? *Confused VHD is a hard drive of a virtual machine which (by default) can be opened by Microsoft Virtual PC