Mount a volume on Windows

After you attach a volume to a Windows node, it appears as a new disk that is often Offline at first. To use it, you bring it online, initialize it (if it is new), create a partition, and format it. Once formatted, the disk appears in File Explorer and Windows remounts it across reboots automatically.

Before you begin

• A volume attached to the node. See Attach a volume.
• Access to the node over Remote Desktop (RDP).

Bring the disk online and initialize it

1. Connect to the Windows node over RDP.
2. Right-click the Start icon and choose Disk Management. The new volume appears as a disk, for example Disk 1, often Offline.
3. Right-click the disk label and choose Online. Its status changes to Online.
4. If the disk is new and unformatted, right-click the disk label and choose Initialize Disk. Choose a partition style: GPT for modern systems and disks larger than 2 TB, MBR for disks up to 2 TB.

Initializing a disk that already has data, such as one created from a snapshot, deletes that data. Initialize only a new, empty disk.

Create a volume and assign a drive letter

1. Right-click the Unallocated space on the disk and choose New Simple Volume.
2. In the wizard, use the default size to take the full disk, assign a drive letter such as D:, and choose a file system (pick NTFS; for very large or high-performance workloads, ReFS is an option where supported). Enter a volume label if you like, then finish the wizard. The wizard formats the volume as part of this.

The new volume appears as Healthy in Disk Management and as a drive in This PC.

(Optional) Mount the volume to a folder instead of a drive letter

Windows remounts a drive letter automatically across reboots. If you would rather use a consistent folder path, such as C:\Data, for application data instead of a drive letter:

1. In Disk Management, right-click the volume and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.
2. Click Add, then Mount in the following empty NTFS folder.
3. Choose an empty NTFS folder, such as C:\Data, and confirm.

The volume then appears at that folder path as well as under its drive letter.

The volume is formatted, usable, and remounted automatically after a reboot. Before you detach it, close anything using it and take the disk offline; see Detach a volume. If the disk does not appear, see Troubleshooting Volumes.