Why I don’t see any data disk attached inside my Azure Virtual Machine?

In Azure, you can attach multiple data disks to your virtual machine based upon the type of virtual machine size you select. These can be standard disks or premium disks.  If you attach a data disk then they won’t magically show up in the file explorer. You will have to initialize a new data disk and create a volume from the server manager if you are on windows server operating systems. From Azure I have added 500GB data disk. In the below screenshot the highlighted disk is the one we want to initialize.

If you open disk management, then it will ask you to initialize the disk.

Click Ok.

You can now just right click disk that you created and create a New Simple Volume.

Now you know the game right, just keep clicking next until you want to change a setting and you are done.

After you follow the prompts you can open file explorer and see that a new drive is available.

You can do the same thing without opening Disk Management. This can be done from Server Manager window itself the wizard is bit nicer looking.  Have fun with your data disks.