An easy option to automatically attach vhd images is to use the diskpart command line utility which is part of the Windows 7 operating system. Diskpart is a powerful tool to enable storage configuration from the command line (as well as remote sessions and scripts).

Diskpart can be lauched manually by typing in diskpart in the run box in the Windows 7 start menu. This will open a new command line window with Diskpart launched.

The first command specifies the vhd image that should be attached to Windows 7:

select vdisk file=c:\pathtovhdfile

The second command attaches the specified vhd image

attach vdisk

This is the manual process. To automate the process of attaching a vhd to the system do the following. Create a new text document and place the two lines mentioned above in it. You can add those two lines again for every vhd image that should be automatically mounted during system start. Save the file as vhdattach.s

Create a new text document and add the following line to it.

diskpart -s “c:\pathtovhdattach.s”

Rename the text document to diskpart.cmd and place this file in the startup folder in the Windows start menu. Diskpart.cmd will be executed on startup of the operating system. It will process the commands in vhdattach in diskpart so that the vhd images will be attached to the system.

It might be necessary on the first run to go into the disk management tool to format the vhd drives in Windows so that drive letters are assigned to them. The Disk Management tool can also be used to detach vhd images.

Gizmo Drive (via Lee at Download Squad) is yet another tool to mount CD and DVD images in Windows. It can mount ISO, BIN, CUE, MDS, MDF, NRG and VHD images which are essentially the most popular image formats. Images can be mounted using the shell in Windows Explorer, the command line or the graphical user interface.

Gizmo Drive can mount as many CD, ISO or Virtual Hard Drive images as there are free drive letters available. Each image can be remounted during Windows Startup or write protected so that the data does not get changed.

It is also possible to create new ISO images with some interesting features besides being able to mount existing images. Gizmo Drive can create virtual hard drive images, ISO images from disc and virtual hard drives that reside in RAM and act as a RAM drive. The virtual hard drives can be compressed and encrypted for additional security.

The drive mounting software has a surprisingly low resource usage when minimized in the Windows System Tray with less than four Megabytes of computer memory total. Make sure you only check the GDrive option during setup unless you want to install other programs as well.