Disk management unable to connect to virtual disk service
Matthew Harrington 
On Win 10 in Computer Management (local), I click on Disk Management and see "Unable to connect to Virtual Disk Service".
The obvious thing to check was whether VDS was running. It was not, and was set to start manually. I changed it to automatic start, and started it. When I tried Disk Management again, I got the same message. Back in Services, Virtual Disk is no longer running. Actually, Services says it's running but there's also the option to start the service; see Virtual Disk running and startable. But if I open a new Services window, it's not running. Clicking Start at this point doesn't get me anywhere.
I've searched at length, tried sfc and dism, without success. Any suggestions?
131 Answer
Please check if you are running any third-party anti-virus application, if yes, please uninstall the anti-virus application.
For test purposes, please try to clean-boot the system, and check if the issue still exists in clean boot.
Please check if there's any disk error in the event log, if yes, please try to un-attach the non-system drive, check if it could work.
If the above method not works, we may need to collect some information to analyze the issue.
As Disk Management snap-in works closely with Virtual Disk Service, We may enable VDS registry key on the problematic server to capture the VDS log file for the analysis.
a. Click Start, click Run, type Regedit, and then click OK.
b. Locate the following subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\vds
c. Right-click the vds subkey, point to New, and then click Key.
d. Name the new key DebugLog.
e. Right-click the new DebugLog key, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
f. Name the new value Level.
Double-click the new Level value, Set the value to 15 (hex 0xF) to on the Value data text box, and then click OK.
g. The $VDS$.log file is created in the %Systemroot%\System32 folder.
Meanwhile, please also try using Process monitor to capture the process when you can reproduce the issue.
Steps:
- Download process monitor from the link given here
Run the process monitor on the problematic server
Start Process Monitor. You will see File/Registry activity is being captured.
Press Ctrl+E to stop logging data.
Press Ctrl+X to clear the currently captured data.
Under Process Monitor, press Ctrl+E to start gathering data.
- Now try to reproduce the issue.
Try to Open Disk Management console to reproduce the issue with the error message "Unable to Connect to Virtual Disk Service"
Under Process Monitor, Press Ctrl+E to stop capturing.
Please save the captured data from Process Monitor to a file (File->Save)
Press Ctrl + L to launch the Process Monitor filter.
