Initializing a Newly Added Hard Drive

After you add a new blank virtual hard drive to the virtual machine configuration, it remains invisible to the operating system unless you initialize it.

Initializing a New Virtual Hard Drive in Windows

To initialize a new hard drive in Windows 11, you will need to do the following:

1. Open the start menu by clicking on the Windows logo and choose Settings.

2. On the left, choose System and scroll to the Storage menu item.

3. Under Storage management, expand the Advanced storage settings sub-menu and select Disks & volumes.
4. Find the new virtual hard drive from the list and click Initialize.

In older versions of Windows, you can initialize a new drive by locating the Disk Management utility in the Control Panel, launching the Initialize and Convert Disk wizard, and creating a new volume on that disk afterwards.

Initializing a New Virtual Hard Drive in Linux

Initializing a new virtual hard disk in a Linux guest OS involves allocating the virtual hard disk space to a new volume and mounting this volume in the guest OS.

Once you have connected a new external disk or added a virtual drive to the Linux virtual machine, do the following:

1. Launch the Disks utility by clicking on the Show Applications icon in the bottom left corner and typing "disks" into the search bar;
2. In the Disks utility window, select the newly added disk from the left sidebar;

3. In the top right corner of the Disks utility window, select the menu marked with three vertically aligned dots and choose the Format Disk option;
4. Leave the default options on and click Format;

5. Confirm your choice by clicking the red Format button and typing in your password if prompted.

Now that you have initialized the disk, partition it by doing the following:

1. Under the volume map, click the (+) button;

2. In the revealed dialog, choose the size of the partition and click Next;

3. In the next dialog, type in the volume's name, choose one of the suggested file systems and click Create.

Once the operation completes, click on the triangular Play button to mount the new partition and be able to access it from your Linux machine.