Windows can assign drive letters to VHD, VHDX, or ISO files. Recuva sees whatever volume the OS exposes, the same rules apply as for a physical partition. If the backing file sits on a slow or failing disk, scans and recoveries inherit that bottleneck or instability.
Read-only mounts protect the image from accidental writes but still read through the parent storage. Unmount images you do not need so drive letters and “which disk am I scanning?” stay obvious in the wizard.
Tips
- Confirm in Disk Management or Explorer which letter belongs to the image versus the host volume.
- Recover from the mounted image to a real disk, not back into the sparse VHD unless you understand the growth and overwrite risk.
- Hyper-V, WSL2, and other tools add extra virtual disks; label or note letters before a long Deep Scan.
Short context: How it works: when it matters.