Windows 8 installation with USB flash drives achieves peaceful coexistence with Win7

Some friends want to play with Windows 8? Now that Win8 DP is available, we provide a great method to install Windows 8 on a USB flash drive or mobile hard drive, and Win8 and Win7 coexist.

Prepare the Installation File: Prepare a mobile hard drive or USB flash drive larger than 5 GB (if no development tool version is installed, about 4 GB is enough). If it is a USB flash drive, download Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool to make Windows 8 dp iso a boot disk. If it is a mobile hard disk, you need to set it as follows:

(I chose this solution) Ensure that there is enough space for a partition in the hard disk, or separate a 5-10 Gb space. In Windows system management, set the partition to active in disk management:



Then, read ISO from the virtual optical drive, copy all the files in it to this partition (including hidden files), or we can prepare a DVD9 disk for burning (not recommended, I have not tested the domestic environment, so I may not try it.

Start installation: First, check whether your computer motherboard supports USB boot. If yes, choose USB boot when starting the system, and you will be able to smoothly enter the Windows 8 DP installation interface.

(Note: if you cannot access normally, such as report HAL errors, you can only congratulate him. Your hardware is too avant-garde and he does not support it .)

When you select a partition, You need to press Shift + F10 to call up the command line. When OK, we need to create a Virtual Hard Disk and mount the VHD.

Use the command line DIR to first find a large enough partition on an existing partition. I suggest you find a partition with 50 GB of free space and above, and remember its drive letter, such as D disk, go to the DISKPART tool and enter DISKPART in the command line.

Run the create vdisk file = "d: win8.vhd" type = expandable maximum = 50000 command on D: create a VHD file with a maximum space of 50 GB under the disk (of course, you can also use a fixed size type = fixed ).

You must be reminded not to think that it is a dynamic increase of space, and I can create it in a partition with only less than 50 GB left, as in the past, although a General Virtual Machine can read and boot the system or file in the VHD, it still cannot be started directly through the physical machine, when starting the boot, she needs to create a logical partition based on VHD settings. Therefore, if you are less than 50 GB and want to occupy 50 GB of space, an error with insufficient space is reported. Therefore, remember to select a partition with enough space and set a reasonable maximum value.

Then select the VHD file and mount it:



Click refresh to refresh the selected partition, find the partition you just mounted, confirm the size, select it, and then start the installation.

To create a VHD instance, you can create a VHD instance in the disk management module of Windows 7:



Then, restart and install successfully.

After Windows 8 is installed, it will generate its own Boot Manager, which supports booting Win8 directly in VHD, so you should see the following interface:



On the above page, select the system you want to access.

If you are familiar with BCDEdit, you can modify the Boot Manager content or use the Boot Manager for Windows 7. Here we recommend the EasyBCD tool, which provides a visual interface that is easier to operate and more intuitive than command line bcdedit. (It is recommended that you be familiar with the operation, otherwise it will be easy to get into the system)

Okay, just a few simple steps. The entire installation process is less than 20 minutes. Finally, let's look at my post-login:



Note: I have installed Office 2010 on Windows 8 DP, which seems to be very stable at present. The same line of Windows is still authentic. However, it is also worth noting that Win 8 is something added to the kernel like Win 7. Focus on the development of his Metro Style