Use the Linux boot disk to switch and install Windows with the same drive letter

The Windows XP system has become very slow due to long-time use on home computers. In addition, my wife installed a lot of messy software on the computer. It is estimated that the software was bundled for the son to find educational software. Especially when surfing the Internet, some advertisements are often displayed automatically and cannot be turned off. I decided to reinstall Windows XP. However, to reinstall the system and install all the required software, it is estimated that the installation will not end in two days. In addition, I want to be careful not to rush to install various software, and I am bound to install some unwanted software. In order to be able

The Windows XP system has become very slow due to long-time use on home computers. In addition, my wife installed a lot of messy software on the computer. It is estimated that the software was bundled for the son to find educational software. Especially when surfing the Internet, some advertisements are often displayed automatically and cannot be turned off. I decided to reinstall Windows XP.

However, to reinstall the system and install all the required software, it is estimated that the installation will not end in two days. In addition, I want to be careful not to rush to install various software, and I am bound to install some unwanted software. In order to be able to reinstall the system slowly and with caution without affecting my dear wife and son's use of the computer, I thought of the "using the Linux boot disk to switch two Windows with the same drive letter" method.

I have installed a Ubuntu system in my mobile hard drive, where I can start the computer from USB to Ubuntu, and then use the Ubuntu partition tool GParted (see http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2011-02/32525.htm and http://www.linuxidc.com/Linux/2011-05/35690.htm) to partition the hard disk. My original hard disk partition is: sda1 is FAT16 boot partition; sda2 is extended partition, which is divided, FAT32 sda5, NTFS sda6, ext4 sda7, NTFS sda8, and linux-swap sda9. The old XP system is installed in the sda6 partition, which is an edisk and sda8 is a f disk. Now I have reduced sda7 (www.linuxidc.com) and made up 10 Gb of space to create an NTFS partition for installing a new XP system. Because my goal is to replace the old XP system after the new XP system is fully installed, the new XP system also needs to be installed on the edisk. So I used GParted's "Management Flag" function to set sda6 as a hidden partition. When I restart and install the new XP, the system will think that the new NTFS partition is an edisk. Note that the new NTFS partition must be before the old f-disk partition. Because the XP system determines the drive letter based on the physical location of the partition. In addition, the XP installer will reset the partition number based on the physical location of the partition. Therefore, after installing the new XP system, start the computer from USB to go to Ubuntu and open GParted, the new NTFS partition sda10 is changed to sda8, and the subsequent partition numbers are changed.

Now, the new XP system has been installed, and the driver and application software will be installed next time. At this time, we used GParted in Ubuntu to hide the partitions of the new XP system, unhide the partitions of the old XP system, and restart the system to access the old XP system to use the original software. Now the boot computer will display two XP instances for you to choose to start. I will click "edit" in "Start and fault recovery" of "System Properties" and "advanced" options ", change the names of the two XP instances to different ones to facilitate the differences. By default, the old XP system is enabled for the convenience of the wife. For her, the computer is the same as before.