Wonderful use of native boot to achieve a single partition dual system

We are resting on Sunday, and suddenly there are old friends visiting the door. It should be noted that the style of this guy is nothing to go to the Three Treasure Hall. It is definitely something to visit on Sunday. After sitting down and asking, I realized that the old friend’s notebook was only divided into one area, and the XP system was installed. I heard that the latest Win7 system received rave reviews and he also wanted to experience it. But I have no extra partitions on my laptop, so he wants to use the partitioning tool to split an existing partition into two to make room for Win7. But he is concerned that these tools take a long time to convert partitions, and there is a risk of data loss, so I ran to recommend a good partitioning software.

After listening to the old friend's remarks, I said to him infinitely and sympathetically: "You have not seen it for many days, you have completely out! Your idea is suitable for the system before Win7, but if you use On Win7, that is very disrespectful to Win7!" When the old friend listened to the big joy, let me talk about it carefully and humbly expressed his willingness to hear the details. I think this guy is sincere and can be taught, and can't help but hold it out. Originally Win7 supports native boot technology and can boot the system from a virtual hard disk. As long as your hard disk still has space to accommodate a virtual hard disk file, Win7 can be installed on this virtual hard disk. Moreover, after installing the virtual hard disk, Win7 can form a dual boot system with the original old operating system, and will not destroy the data of the old system. Even better, Win7 uses the hardware of the physical machine, and its performance is almost the same as that of the operating system installed on the physical partition. It is basically negligible. After listening to the old friend, he said that this native startup sounds good, but it is hard to say how to use it. It is best to use his machine to do an experiment, so he is completely convinced. I understand it when I hear it. This guy wants me to volunteer for him. Haha, okay, today is a little bit of time. Let me introduce you to the specific implementation method. You can’t just say that you don’t practice fake!

First put the Win7 installation CD in the computer, after booting from the installation CD, you can see the interface shown in Figure 1. Do not click "Next" at this time, but press Shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt window.

Figure 1

After pressing Shift+F10, we get the command prompt window shown in Figure 2. We first typed a command md c:\\vhd. This command means to create a directory named VHD on the C drive. We will put the virtual hard disk in this directory. The second command is Diskpart. Diskpart is a very powerful hard disk management tool. We can use Diskpart to complete the creation, hooking and other work of virtual hard disk.

Figure 2

Next we have to create a virtual hard disk, as shown in Figure 3, in Diskpart we entered the command create vdisk File=”c:\\ Vhd\\win7.vhd” maximum=20000 type=fixed. Create vdisk file=“c:\\vhd\\win7.vhd” is to create a Win7.vhd virtual hard disk file in the c:\\vhd directory; maximum=20000 is to set the maximum space of the virtual hard disk to 20000M, also It is 20G; Type=Fixed is to allocate 20G space to the virtual hard disk at one time, so as to avoid the space of the virtual hard disk in the future.

Figure 3

As shown in Figure 4, the next command to be entered is select vdisk file=“c:\\vhd\\Win7.vhd”, this one The purpose of the command is to select the virtual hard disk file you just created.

Figure 4

As shown in Figure 5, the next command is attach vdisk. The purpose of this command is to mount the virtual hard disk to the disk manager. After using this command, Disk Manager will think that there is a 20G hard disk in the computer. After using the attach command, we can type exit to exit Diskpart, then enter exit again to exit the command prompt window. Return to the installation interface shown in Figure 1, click "Next" to continue.

Figure 5

After the virtual hard disk is leveled, as shown in Figure 6, click "Install Now" to start the Win7 installation process.

Figure 6

The installation wizard in Figure 7 asks whether to use an upgrade or a custom installation, of course, choose a custom installation.

Figure 7

The most exciting time is coming! As shown in Figure 8, the installer checks that there are two hard disks in the computer, and disk 1 is a fake. In fact, disk 1 is the virtual hard disk we just created. This is good, you can install Win7 directly on disk 1. Although the figure suggests that Windows cannot be installed on this disk, there is no problem with the installation.

Figure 8

As shown in Figure 9, the installation is going very smoothly, and the basics are almost finished....

Figure 9

As shown in Figure 10, Win7 is finally installed, we saw the Win7 startup screen. Then it is to install the hardware driver in Win7, deploy the application, Win7 is no different from Win7 installed on a physical partition.

Figure 10

Win7 installation does not affect the original XP system, as shown in Figure 11, we see that the Win7 boot menu contains the original Old operating system. We went into the XP system to test it and found that everything was still the same, without any exceptions.

Figure 11

Some friends are more worried about the performance problem, Win7 is installed on the virtual hard disk, in theory, through a layer of conversion from virtual hard disk to physical disk How much impact does this conversion have on computer performance? Figure 12 is a performance comparison test performed by an authority on Win7 installed on a physical disk and Win7 installed on a virtual disk. As we can see from the figure, Win7 installed on the virtual disk will show a small difference in performance only when Win7 performs a continuous 64K write operation on the hard disk. The other operations on the hard disk basically do not see the native boot. Win7 has any performance disadvantages.

Figure 12

After tossing, the old friend is very satisfied, and he thinks that the natively launched Win7 also has the advantage of easy migration. Yes, copying the virtual hard disk files over the time of migrating Win7 is fine. It is much easier to back up Win7. In addition, the virtual hard disk file can also support the differential disk. If you start Win7 from the differential disk, it will mean a hard disk recovery card. The older the friend, the more happy he was, the more he was happy to go home and experience it. At this time, I thought of a key question: "Hey, come back, you haven't invited me to eat yet...."