Windows 8 In Depth

Mounting a Virtual Hard Disk

In the same way that an ISO disk image file is an exact replica of an optical disc, a virtual hard disk (VHD) is a disk image that is an exact replica of a physical hard disk, including the file system and the hard disk’s volumes, folders, and files. A virtual hard disk is stored as a VHD file that uses the .vhd file extension.

Why would you need such a thing? The most common use by far for VHDs is the hard disk for a virtual machine, especially one created using Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtual machine manager.

Windows 8 bakes support for VHD files right into File Explorer, so you can easily view the contents of and copy data from a VHD file without third-party software. File Explorer accomplishes this by enabling you ...