Powershell cmdlets one-by-one or How to replace diskpart with powershell

Yes, yes I know... The Swedish Powershell MVP Niklas Goude will probably kick my ass if he ever found out I wrote this blog post...

 

But not all of us were born composing powershell scripts with our eyes closed, so here are some baby steps (one-by-one cmdlets) to help you get started with understanding how awesome powershell is :)

 

What I did was that I sat down and got-help in powershell and actually figured out how to create a virtual machine and a virtual disk a.k.a I'm trying to step away from diskpart (that we all know and love)

 

Creating a virtual machine, mounting an ISO and starting it, FTW

 

First of all, you need Powershell 3.0 to accomplish this, that either means you need a Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 host with Hyper-V installed. (Yes Hyper-V is included in both the client and the server)

 

Create, start a virtual machine and mount an ISO with Powershell

 

Run Powershell as administrator and execute the following:

New-VM -Name VM01 -MemoryStartupBytes 1024MB

The command creates a new virtual machine named VM01 with 1024 MB memory.

 

Now you need to create a virtual disk for the machine:

 

New-VHD -Path C:\VM\VM01.vhdx -SizeBytes 30GB -Dynamic

After creating the disk you'd want to attach it to the virtual machine

Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName VM01 -Path C:\VM\VM01.vhdx

Then to mount an ISO you execute

Set-VMDvdDrive -VMName VM01 -ControllerNumber 1 -Path C:\ISO\windows.ISO

And then start the machine!

 

Start-vm –name VM01

 

 

Create, select, partition and format VHD in Powershell or...
"How to replace diskpart with powershell"

 

So diskpart, create vdisk and so on, how-to do the same thing in powershell...

 

Create a virtual disk

 

New-VHD -Path C:\VM\windows.vhdx -SizeBytes 30GB -Dynamic

 

Mount the VHD (instead of attaching it in diskpart)

 

Mount-VHD -Path C:\VM\windows.vhdx

 

Find out which disk number the mounted VHD got

 

Get-Disk

 

Bring the disk online (and YES you specify 1 instead of 0 if you want to take it offline)

 

Set-Disk -Number 2 -IsOffline 0

 

Make the disk writable (and YES you specify it to be Read only with 1)

 

Set-Disk -Number 2 -isReadOnly 0

 

Initialize the disk

 

Initialize-Disk -Number 2 -PartitionStyle MBR

 

Create a partition on disk 2 and automatically assign a driveletter

 

New-Partition -Disknumber 2 -UseMaximumSize -AssignDriveLetter

 

Format the volume

 

Get-Partition -Disknumber 2 | Format-Volume -FileSystem FAT32

By the way, if you try to eject the virtual disk in windows explorer or disk management you will most likely get an error message, so if you want to

Dismount the VHD execute the following
Dismount-VHD -Path C:\vm\windows.vhdx

And then there are the rest of the Storage Cmdelts awesomeness