Windows 7: Auto-Mount VHDs at Startup

Howdy folks,

We’ll have to make this a quick post, since I am only on for a 15 mins break at the SPOC 2010 conference . I prepared a few things, and now I am putting them together.

First of all, I hope you enjoy as much as I do the concept of having VHDs under Windows 7. For those who don’t know where to get started, go to Computer –> Manage –> Disk Management (shown in Figure 1)

Figure 1: Disk management. Right-click in order to create or attach VHDs.

And this is where the problem resides. Everytime you want to mount your disks, you have to enter here and execute “Attach Vhd” manually. Not cool enough for us.

The solution: A script, executed as scheduled task (run as Administrator)

These are the steps:

1. Create a script that calls the diskpart commands
2. Call the script from a batch file
3. Create a scheduled task for it.

Sounds simple? It is!

1. Create a script that calls diskpart commands.

Figure 2: The attachScript.txt script file.

2. Call the script from a batch file

Figure 3: The corresponding batch file: Just calling diskpart with the /s switch and the script file from Figure 2

3. Create a scheduled task for it

Step 1: Start –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Task Scheduler

Step 2: Set the following fields (Tab: General):

• Name: Choose what you like. Here: “Mount Vhds”
• Security options (1): Change User or Group –> Choose an Administrator!
• Security options (2): Run whether user is logged on or not – makes sense. We don’t need the admin to be logged on for us to access our Vhd, right?
• Security options (3): Do not store password. You can optionally set this.

Step 3: Set “Begin the task” to At startup. Now our task will run at startup.

Step 4: Specify which file to run (our created batch/AttachVhds.bat). Confirm by clicking on OK.

That’s it! We’re done! From now on, each time we start the computer, our created task will run!

Important: This is not the most elegant way of automating such a thing, but at the moment there is not a lof of choice under Windows 7. For Windows Server 2008 R2, you can also perform this functionality using PowerShell (and not diskpart/batch files etc.).

I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial!

Cheers & best greetings from Milan,

Martin

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