Sometimes you may want to install applications or store files outside the C: drive. This will require a second and even a third hard drive to be configured on the virtual machine and you can start using these drives as the backup drives. In this guide, I will show you How to Add Another Hard Drive to a Virtual Machine in HyperV. Please see how to enable Siri on Mac devices, how to Fix unable to login to Trellix ePO with Windows authentication, and How to Sync Data in Cloud Drives to Synology NAS.
Below is an image of the current drives that exist on the Virtual Machine. I will now show you how to add another drive to the Devices and Drives section.
You can read about How to run Windows 11 on HyperV, How to start HyperV VMs in safe mode, How to fix HyperV Virtual Machine display taking over the entire screen. Check this to learn How to check Hard Drive Health (SMART) in Windows and you can also read about how to increase HyperV disk size.
Add a Second Hard Drive to a Virtual Machine in HyperV
1. Open the Hyper-V Manager and right-click on the Virtual Machine, navigate to New > Hard Disk.
2. On the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard page choose the disk format. In this setup we are choosing VHDX. Click Next.
3. Next choose the disk type. We shall be creating another virtual hard disk with a Fixed size because this comes with better performance and high levels of disk activity.
4. Specify the name of the virtual hard disk and also the location the disk file will be saved.
Configure Disk
5. The next step is to configure the disk and you can decide to create a blank virtual hard disk or copy from another physical disk or virtual hard disk. We will select the new blank virtual hard disk option and set the hard disk size. Click finish.
6. The Process of creating the new virtual hard disk will begin and you will see the progress.
HyperV Settings
7. After the Virtual Hard Disk is created successfully then click on SCSI Controller on the left pane. On the right pane select Hard Drive and click Add.
8. Navigate to where you specify as the location of the virtual hard disk earlier and click on Apply and OK.
Disk Management
9. When you check Devices and Drives section you will not find the Virtual Hard Disk added. You will need to configure the unallocated disk first from the Disk Management. Run diskmgmt.msc.
10. Search for the disk, you will see it tagged as Unknown and Unallocated Disk. Right-click on it and select Online.
11. After setting the disk to Online, right-click on it and select Initialize Disk.
12. On the next page select GPT (GUID Partition Table). Click OK to Initialize the Disk.
13. The next step is to right-click on the disk and select New Simple Volume.
14. Specify the Volume Size that your physical server can accommodate and click Next.
Labelling Drive
15. The next step is to assign a drive letter. The letter is automatically displayed based on the letters used for the current drive. If E is the last letter for the current drive, then the next letter will be F.
16. The next step is to select the File system and label the volume and you can decide to format the volume. Click Next and on the next page you will get a success message. Click Finish.
17. When you check the Virtual Disk from the Disk Management again, it will no longer show as unallocated and can now be accessible.
18. When you check the Devices and drives section you will find the Virtual Hard Disk created with the name TechDirectArchive DISK.
Here is a YouTube video showing this process.
FAQs
What is difference between GPT and MBR?
Master Boot Record (MBR) disks use the standard BIOS partition table. GUID partition table (GPT) disks use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). One of the benefits of GPT disks is that you can create more than four partitions on each disk. GPT has a disk capacity that is larger than 2 terabytes.
How do I add unallocated space to my C drive?
Run diskmgmt.msc to open the disk management. Right-click on the C drive, and select the Extend Volume option to extend the C drive with the unallocated space.
I hope you found this blog post on how to Add Another Hard Drive to a Virtual Machine in HyperV Interesting and helpful. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask in the comment section.
