How to make your Block Storage volume available for use on Windows?

This article will guide you in attaching a Block Storage volume to your Windows instance.

Pre-requisites:

a. A Windows instance

b. A Volume

c. Good internet connectivity

Step 1: Login to your account.

Step 2: Navigate to Compute and then click on Instances.

Step 3: Choose the instance for which you want to attach the volume, click the drop-down, and choose Attach Volume.

Step 4: Select the Volume and click Submit.

Note: The volume should already be created and not attached to any instance.

With the above steps, the volume has been attached but not mounted. We must follow the steps below to mount the attached volume to our Windows machine.

Step 1: Select your instance and click on Instance Name.

Step 2: Click on the Console tab.

Step 3: On the remote desktop, right-click the Start button and click Disk Management from the list.

A dialogue box appears, showing all the disks available on the computer. The unallocated disk is marked with a red sign, which we'll allocate in the further steps.

Step 4: The attached disk will be available offline. To make it online, on the unallocated disk, right-click and select Online.

Step 5: You'll likely need to initialize a disk when creating a brand-new storage device before using it. To do so, right-click again on the unallocated disk and select Initialize Disk.

Step 6: A setup dialogue box appears; click Next to continue.

Step 7: You’ll be asked for the partition style; select MBR (Master Boot Record) and click OK. If your disk space is over 2TB, you may use a GPT (GUID Partition Table).

The setup wizard shows the minimum and maximum disk space availability in MBs and allows the user to modify the volume size as per the requirements.

Step 8: Select the volume size and click Next.

Step 9: Choose the preferred drive letter from the drop-down menu and click Next.

Step 10: Click Finish.

The volume has been successfully allocated, which you can see in the console windows of This PC.