So my girlfriend got her laptop from her cousin about 4 months ago, and while cleaning it, I found a .vhd partition taking up 20GB. I have no clue how this works or what it’s for, but it seems like a strange attempt at partitioning. How can I reintegrate this 20GB back into the main partition? It’s just sitting there, and she can’t use it.
Honestly, if it’s a used laptop, just do a clean reinstall of Windows using the media creation tool from Microsoft. You have no idea what the previous owner put on it.
A .vhd file isn’t a partition you’d normally see in Disk Management. It’s a virtual hard drive file used for virtual machines. If they were using it for testing or something, they can delete it if it’s not needed.
So, can I just mount a .vhd file without a VM? That’s neat! I might just delete it once I’m done.
If the VHD is attached, you should be able to see it in Disk Management. You can attach or detach it whenever. If you don’t need it, detach it and then delete the .vhd file.
To detach it, just open Disk Management, right-click on the VHD partition, and select ‘Detach VHD’. Easy peasy.
Thanks! I’ll do that. How do I actually detach it?
Assuming you’re on Windows 11, just search for ‘Disk Management’, right-click on the VHD partition, and click ‘Detach VHD’. Then hit OK.
Got it! I’ll check that out and see if I can get that space back for her.