VHD or Virtual Hard Disks are a great way to create backup and work on different operating systems without installing a new physical hard drive or partition. The Virtual disks are capable of hosting the NTFS, FAT, exFAT and UDFS file systems while supporting the standard disk as well as file operations.
These are supported in Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Virtual Server and Windows Virtual PC. The VHD comes handy when developers need to check particular software on different operating systems. Instead of installing different hard disks, or creating partitions, developers can create, mount a VHD and test their software in various operating systems.
Windows 7 uses the Virtual Hard disk format to create the full backup of your computer system. If you have Windows 7 installed, you may mount the virtual hard drives in the operating system with ease and utilize them for creation of backup or other similar features.
If you have a VHD file and you need to extract some information from it, here are few steps to mount the VHD on your Windows 7 and get the desired information:
- Click on start and go to Control Panel
- Click the ‘View by:’ drop down menu in the upper right hand side and select ‘small icons’
- Click on administrative tools and double click on computer management icon
- Right click on ‘disk management’ on the left hand side of the screen and select ‘attach VHD’
- Click on the browse button and find the location of VHD file you wish to mount and double click on it
- Click ok, and wait for the message ‘device driver installed successfully’
- When VHD appears as a new device in the computer management window, click start->computer and double click on the new hard drive icon to perform further operation
Do not forget to ‘detach VHD’ once you are done. No matter what type of VHD you have and how safely you use it, most of them get damaged due to following reasons:
- Faulty/failing physical storage
- Transferring files over faulty/ failing networks
Under certain circumstances, when VHD are corrupted, it either refuses to start or fails to attach itself and gives these messages:
“Failed to open attachment ‘C: \directory\MyVHD.vhd’. Error: “The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.”
Manual VHD Recovery may require certain technical skills and there may not be any guarantee of entire recovery. Hence, it is preferred to use, VHD Recovery, the third party easy to use professional software. This is user friendly and promises entire VHD recovery within minutes. Users can try this product before purchasing by downloading the trial version.
