This article focus on VHD Resizer. First will tell you what is VHD and its functions, then will recommend you an amazing VHD resizer - AOMEI Partition Assistant, and tells you how to use it.
By Catherine / Last Updated January 11, 2021
The full name of VHD is Virtual Hard Disk. It is a file formatted to be structurally identical to a physical hard disk. It is typically used in various virtualization packages, and can be used to install a wide variety of operating systems (various versions of Windows and Linux).
Virtualization now has become one of the most used features in personal computers and data centers. Since the standalone application “Virtual PC 2007” back in Windows XP days up to current Hyper-V feature in Windows 7, the amount of users has been steadily growing. VHD resizer is also growing at the same time.
Windows 7 is the most popular Windows OS today, so here I take Windows 7 as an example.
1. Open disk management, click the “Action” button then select “Create VHD” option.
2. In the pop-up window, select the VHD format and location on the machine. Click “OK”.
3. After it is initialized, you can create partition on it.
Above I taught you how to create VHD. You see, to create a Windows VHD either through Virtual PC or Virtual Server, you have to specify the maximum size of the file first. You can set the VHD to be a fixed or dynamically sized file, the total size the VHD is determined at the time you create it. either by mistake, on purpose, because you were in a hurry, or by ignorance. Or even you just found it there, you clicked on the default options and create a dynamic 19.53Gb VHD.
Whatever the case, over time, you may actually realize that the amount of VHD volume assigned to is far away from being used. And plan to extend the total size of the VHD file to allow more space for installed programs and data files. So we need a VHD resizer to resize VHD.
First we should know what is VHD Resizer. Windows 7 built-in disk management can be as a VHD Resizer, which allows you to extend or shrink the attached VHD as the same as the physical disks. More information please refer to Windows Help Document. I’ll ignore it here.
You can adapt the third-party resizer - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, not only can help you resize VHD partition, but also has some other advanced partition operations: split VHD partition, convert FAT to NTFS, convert dynamic to basic, copy partition and so on.
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1.Download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition, install and run. In the main interface you will directly get the hard drive information like disk model, partition file system, capacity, etc. Right-choose the partition on the VHD that you want to resize.
2. In the pop-up window, drag the partition handle leftwards to shrink the one you decided to resize.
3. You can click “apply” to commit the change on the main interface. Or to extend another partittion, move the D drive to the right-end of the box, and click "OK"
5. Click "Apply" on the main interface to commit the operation.
Resizing means shrinking or extending. Above is only an example of shrinking. Maybe you will encounter a situation that need to expand VHD partition. AOMEI Partition Assistant is able to do this. “Extend Partition Wizard” and “Allocated Free Space” are two practical functions.
AOMEI Partition Assistant is not only a VHD resizer, but also a optimizing partition software. You can set partition label freely, change drive letter as you want, check partition and fix errors, etc.
AOMEI Partition Assistant has different editions are designed for different Microsoft platform. Standard Edition is for PC users. As for Windows Server, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Lite Edition or Server Edition.
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