An Easy Guide to Remove a Virtual Hard Disk from a Virtual Machine

Products are useful until they serve their purpose. If after sometimes the relevance of that thing is over, then we delete that thing or discard that resource. The same issue arises when using a Virtual Hard Disk. Users use it whenever they need it, and if they don’t feel the VHD useful, then they look for solutions to remove it. So, in this guide, you will know all the procedures to remove a Virtual Hard Disk from a Virtual Machine. 

VHD is a removable storage disk created by a user on a virtual machine or a system drive. It functions as a physical drive containing partitions for data storage. Virtual Hard disk is also used for other operations such as backup, image management, recovery, and data transfer. 

Why do we remove Hard Disk from Virtual Machine VMWare?

A user creates a virtual hard disk on a virtual machine whenever he/she needs a storage space. After sometimes, when the created VHD becomes unessential, then it needs to be deleted as it acquires space. We, as a user, need to remove VHD(Virtual Hard Disk) to free up storage space. In some cases its also possible that VHD gets infected by some malicious attacks, and it becomes inaccessible. In such a case, it is required to remove or delete VHD file from Virtual machine or VMWare. 

Let’s begin with the methods and procedures for removing a VHD from a Virtual Machine. 

Secure Procedures to Remove a Virtual Hard Disk from a Virtual Machine

You can go for two available methods to delete VHD from your PC as follows:

Method 1: Using DiskPart on Command Prompt

Using CMD commands, you will able to detach the VHD files and removing the Virtual Hard Disk from your system. Do as follows:

1. On windows icon, type cmd on the search bar and navigate to Command Prompt application. Press right-click on Command prompt>>run as administrator option. 
2. Hit on yes to proceed further.
3. Now, a command prompt screen will open, type the diskpart command.
4. Then run another command as follows to choose the VHD file:
5. select vdisk file= “<enter VHD file path location>”
6. Using the “detach vdisk” command, detach this VHD file from the disk location.
7. At last, using exit command, leave the Command Prompt window.

Method 2: Using a Disk Management Console

Another method to delete the VHD file from the system. In this method, a Disk Management Console is used, which is very simpler to execute. Follow the below steps for more understanding:

1. Initially, go to start and click on This PC icon. Right-click on it and choose the Manage option.
2. Press Windows + R keys to use the run box and then type diskmgmt.msc  to open the Computer Management page. Hit on the Ok button.
3. Now, you will see a Computer Management page. Here, visit Storage and choose the Disk Management option. You can see all the disk drives and VHDs.
4. Choose the VHD drive that you want to remove from your PC and right-click on it. Hit on the Delete Volume option. 
5. A pop-up message will appear on your screen, press Yes to continue.
6. The VHD disk status will change from Online to Unallocated. To remove the VHD altogether, right-click on the VHD disk icon and choose Detach VHD option to detach the VHD file.
7. At last, you have successfully removed the VHD file from the system drive.

You can follow the steps as mentioned above to remove Hard Disk from Virtual Machine VMWare. While working with the Virtual disk, if you are unable to access them due to file corruption, then you can recover corrupted data from VHD quickly using Virtual Machine Data Recovery utility. Also, it recovers damaged data from VMDK, VDI and VHDX file as well. You can use it to find an immediate solution. 

Conclusion

We have mentioned here about the Virtual Hard Disk in detail. We have also tried to state the reasons for the users to delete it from the system. After this, all manual instructions discussed here to remove a Virtual Hard Disk from a Virtual Machine. If any corruption issue has occurred while handling the VHD file, then a method to revive your VHD is also explained here. I hope you will get satisfactory results with this write-up. 

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