Introduction to Virtual Hard Disk (VHD & VHDX) File

What is a VHDX file?

VHDX is a virtual hard disk file made on Hyper-V platform. Hyper-V is the virtual platform originated by Microsoft. The VHDX file is very beneficial for storage of heavy data. Unlike VHD files, VHDX provides higher storage capacity. The storage capacity provided by the VHDX files are having 64 TB capacity. You can use VHDX Viewer to open, read, explore & view Hyper-V virtual Hard disk Images files of Windows backup.

How to Create VHD / VHDX file?

A file from current Windows machine can be converted to VHD file. To do this, a user needs to go through the following steps:

1. Go to Computer Management and then choose Disk Management
2. Right click on Disk Management
3. Click on Create VHD
4. A new window will pop up on the screen. Here you have to browse the location, specify the size of the file, and choose the format as VHD or VHDX.
5. If you go with VHD file, it will state Fixed size
6. If you selected VHDX file, it will recommend Dynamically expanding

7. Enter the size of the virtual disk. You can change the unit of size to GB or TB using the drop-down arrow.
8. In the Disk Management, there will be a disk which is shown as Not Initialized and Unallocated.
9. Right-click on the grey side of the disk and select “Initialize Disk”.

10. Select the partition style from MBR and GPT as the option.
11. For versions of Windows older than Vista, choose MBR
12. For newer versions and bigger hard disk, choose GPT

13. Now, right-click on the white side of the disk where Unallocated is written. Select New Simple Volume.

14. A New Simple Volume Wizard will appear on the screen. Select the size of new volume. It is not necessary to create the disk of size equal to the unallocated space. If the VHD or VHDX file which you are creating is larger in size, you can also create multiple partitions.

15. Assign a letter to the drive and click Next

16. The last step is to choose the file system in which you want to format the drive. By default, it is NTFS. You can also select FAT32. But, it is recommended to stick with NTFS.

17. Click Next and then Finish and you are done.

18. Now, you can copy data to the disk drive and then detach the VHD when the copying process is done.

How to Mount a VHD / VHDX File?

Go through the following steps to mount or attach a VHD or VHDX file:

• Go to Start and then select Computer Management
• Click on Disk Management. Wait till the list of drives appears on the screen.
• Then, right-click on Disk Management and select Attach VHD from the options

• A dialogue box will appear on the screen. Click on Browse to navigate to the location where you want to mount VHD file and click on OK.

Note: If Read-only box is not checked, you can add, modify, add and delete the files or folders from the virtual disk. This feature is of really help when you want to add some extra data to the files, backup the file and then detach it.


• Once the mounting process is done, the disk will be displayed on the screen as another Basic disk. This disk will be colored little light blue on the icon. Windows will automatically provide it a letter. But, if you want to change the letter, right-click on the part where it states Healthy (Primary Partition) and select Change Drive Letters and Paths.

• After the VHD is attached, navigate to the explorer. Browse the disk. Copy the required data between the drives.

• To detach the VHD, you need to right-click on the grey area and select Detach VHD as the option.

Remove Corruption in VHD / VHDX Files

To remove the corruption from VHD or VHDX file in a manual manner, go through the following method:

• Execute the following command:

• Do not forget to check the data integrity of file before and after performing the above set of commands.
• If the corruption in Virtual Hard Disk or VHDX is still not fixed, you can go for the third-party tool like VHDX Reader. According to the experts, it is the master solution to scan the corrupted files and extracts the healthy files and folders from it.