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

This article will guide you to attach 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 OpenStack console.

Step 2: Go to Instances and choose the instance you want to attach Volume with. You may also search for your instance name using the search bar.

Select Attach Volume from the dropdown menu.

Step 3: From the appeared dialogue box, select the volume from the Volume ID dropdown menu and click Attach Volume.

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

With the above steps, the volume has been attached but not mounted.

To mount the attached volume to our windows machine, we need to follow the steps below.

Step 1: From the Instances, select your instance and click Console.

Step 2: 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 3: The attached Disk will be available offline. To make it online, on the unallocated disk, right-click and select Online.

Step 4: 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 5: A setup dialogue box appears; click Next to continue.

Step 6: Further, you’ll be asked for the partition style; select MBR (Master Boot Record).

If your disk pace is more than 2TB, you may use a GPT (GUID Partition Table).

Step 7: 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.

After selecting the volume size, click Next.

Step 8: Choose the preferred drive letter from the drop-down menu and click Next.

Step 9: Click Finish.

The volume has been successfully allocated, which you can see in your console window's This PC.