Overview

When automating provisioning of Windows systems, it might be useful to be able to list, format and mount (or attach) block devices using Powershell to streamline an end-to-end deployment process.

Preparation

Now we have:

  1. Vagrant set up to run under Libvirt on Fedora
  2. A Windows Vagrant box ready to run

We can get ready to discover disks, format, attach, label etc.

  1. Vagrant up the box: 
    $ cd ~/working/vagrant/windows-scratch
$ vagrant up
  2. Connect to the instance, invoke Powershell: 
    $ vagrant ssh
vagrant@192.168.121.8's password: <default vagrant password: vagrant>
vagrant@WIN-JSJO34QHSE7 C:\Users\vagrant> pwsh
PS C:\Users\vagrant>

How-to

  1. First, list all the attached block devices: 
    PS> Get-Disk
  2. Check the members in the collection: 
    PS> Get-Disk | Get-Member
  3. Filter this list to a subset of useful properties: 
    PS> Get-Disk | Select-Object Number, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus, Size
Number HealthStatus OperationalStatus        Size
------ ------------ -----------------        ----
  1 Healthy      Offline            2000000000
  0 Healthy      Online            42949672960
  3 Healthy      Offline            2000000000
  4 Healthy      Offline            2000000000
  2 Healthy      Offline            2000000000
  4. Return the same output with better formatting on the Size column: 
    PS> Get-Disk | Select-Object Number, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus, @{N="Size";E={$_.Size / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 }}

    Or alternatively:

    PS C:\Users\vagrant> Get-Disk | Sort-Object Number | Select-Object Number, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus, @{N="Size (GB)";E={[Math]::Round($_.Size/1GB,3)}}
Number HealthStatus OperationalStatus Size (GB)
------ ------------ ----------------- ---------
  0 Healthy      Online                40.00
  1 Healthy      Online                 1.86
  2 Healthy      Offline                1.86
  3 Healthy      Offline                1.86
  4 Healthy      Offline                1.86
  5. Initialise a disk with a GPT partition, and format the volume: 
    PS> Initialize-Disk -Number 1 -PartitionStyle GPT
PS> New-Volume -DiskNumber 1 -FriendlyName DATA1 -FileSystem NTFS
PS> Add-PartitionAccessPath -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 2 -AccessPath D:
  6. We could achieve a similar result in a single pass with: 
    Get-Disk | Where-Object OperationalStatus -eq 'Offline'|
 Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT -PassThru |
 New-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -DriveLetter F -FriendlyName 'New-Volume'
  7. And we can examine the resulting disk layout with: 
    PS C:\Users\vagrant> Get-Partition | Select-Object DiskNumber, PartitionNumber,  DriveLetter, GptType, @{N="Size (GB)";E={[Math]::Round($_.Size/1GB,1)}} | Format-Table         
DiskNumber PartitionNumber DriveLetter GptType                                Size (GB)
---------- --------------- ----------- -------                                ---------
      1               1            {e3c9e316-0b5c-4db8-817d-f92df00215ae}      0.00
      1               2           D {ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7}      1.80
      0               1                                                        0.30
      0               2           C                                            39.70

Shutdown

Once familiar with disk discovery, formatting we can exit and shutdown:

PS C:\Users\vagrant> exit
vagrant@WIN-JSJO34QHSE7 C:\Users\vagrant> exit
$ vagrant halt
$ vagrant destroy

Next steps

Experiment resizing disks transparently at the hypervisor layer then extending the volume and filesystem online over the top.

Further reading