Native Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) support in Windows 8 OS

Posted Date: 06-Sep-2011	Category: Windows 8 News	Rating:
Author: Varun Kumar	Member Level: Diamond	Points: 20

Read this article to know more about Virtual Hard Disk file support in Windows 8 operating system. Recently, Microsoft in its Building Windows 8 blog announced about VHD support in Windows 8 operating system.

Operating system giant Microsoft recently announced that there will be ISO Mount option in Windows 8 operating system. In the previous version of Windows, i.e., Windows 7, Microsoft introduced native DVD burner support for its operating system.

With the help of ISO mount application, it will be very easy to access files which are of .iso file format. From the beginning Windows operating system to the latest Windows 7 operating system, to mount ISO files, all the Windows users has to depend on the third party applications. From the next Windows operating system, i.e., Windows 8, users can mount .iso files and they can easily access the content which is present in the VHD files.

Apart from introducing ISO mount option, Microsoft recently announced its support for accessing Virtual Hard Disk files. Virtual Hard Disks are the format which were used by Virtualization sofware like Hyper-V or Virtual PC.

What is Virtual Hard Disk ?

With the help of VHD, users can encapsulate the hard disk into an individual file for use by the operating system as a virtual disk, like the same way how physical hard disks are used. This format is specially used to store information for Virtual machines. Microsoft introduced new feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 with which users can booth the system from a VHD file. One can easily manage them by using command line and MNC plugins. VHD's are very useful to save the system settings or the snapshot of a system.

How to use VHD files in Windows 8 operating system ?

Users can easily access the VHD files in Windows 8 operating system. The procedure is same for ISO mounting and accessing VHD files. If we mount an ISO file, it will appears as a removable drive, where as the VHD file will appear as new hard drives.

VHD Support in Windows 8 OS

In the above image, you can notice an icon for the drive G: where G is the new VHD file which is appeared as a new physical drive. Users can click on the new drive, and they can work with the new drive like storing files on the drive. Users can do what ever they want with the newly created VHD.

After finishing the work with the VHD drive, users can right-click on the drive or they can click on the Eject button to remove the VHD. Any changes made to the files in the VHD will be saved.

VHD Eject in Windows 8 OS

From the past posts in Building Windows 8 blog, we can conclude that Windows 8 will have
1) An App store
2) Support USB 3.0
3) Improved Copy Jobs feature
4) Ribbon interface for Windows Explorer
5) An option to mount ISO files without using any optical drive .
6) Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file support

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