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Not even sure this is possible- I want to create a dynamic VHD, and then mount it on my win 8.1 machine to copy files onto it. The goal would then be to upload that vhd to the cloud to mount in an AMI or azure VM instance.

I can create the VHD okay in hyper-v manager, but I can't seem to mount it in win8.1 without having to convert it to a non-dynamic disk.

I'm not sure how much data I will need to copy onto the drive and because I have to upload it it's important its as small as possible. Would be uncool to upload a 500GB VHD that only has 1k of data on it.

Can I do this? If so, how?

Nicros
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Are you sure you’re not confusing things here? A dynamically-expanding VHD can still contain any partitioning schema. I’d stick to GPT.

VHDs are best created and attached using Disk Management:
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Daniel B
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  • Yeah I could totally be missing something- but even if I create the VHD in Disk Management and set it up as a GPT partition, it is still unallocated and I can't access the drive- so can't copy data to it. – Nicros May 07 '14 at 18:53
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    Of course. It’s like a brand-new “real” hard drive. You’ll have to run through all the steps: Selecting a partitioning schema, partitioning, formatting...—just right-click on the unallocated space. – Daniel B May 07 '14 at 18:56
  • Yeah but in doing that the max size is the size of the vhd I created. I will be adding more data to it than that... so it seems to no longer be dynamic – Nicros May 07 '14 at 19:09
  • Just try it. You’ll see it’ll all work out. Of course, you need to set your VHD’s size so that all data fits. The difference is that fixed-size VHDs start at full size, while an “empty” dynamically-expanding VHD takes (overhead aside) no space at all. The advertised disk size is the same in both cases! – Daniel B May 07 '14 at 19:16
  • Ahh, I get it. So I set the VHD size to what I need for my data, but the actualy VHD file only takes up the space of the data that was put on it... – Nicros May 07 '14 at 19:19
  • How can you do this from powershell? – not2qubit Jan 17 '20 at 19:37
  • @not2qubit Do what, exactly? It may be better to ask a new question. /e: I see you already did that. – Daniel B Jan 17 '20 at 21:47