Windows 7 Win 7 plus Win 7 on 2 partitions?

[merlincorp]

I have a laptop with a pair of 500Gb physical HDDs, each drive has 3 partitions. For the past 18 months I have been successfully running Vista (my original OS) on C: and Win 7 Home Premium installed on my G: partition on the 2nd physical drive. I think that Vista is irrelevant now and want to reclaim that partition space. I have also lately been having a few problems with progs on G:, which is a complex setup with many programs. No games or trivia, all business or graphic design apps.

I wondered if it might be possible to format C: and install a 2nd version of Win 7 Home on that partition too? This way I could take my time installing all my apps and revert to booting from G: when I need to do some productive work. A full install of programs takes about 3 days by the time all the tweaks and fine tuning are done. That's a lot of time for me to be non-productive, hence my idea of doing a new install in stages. Once finished I could then format the G: partition and reclaim the space for data, returning to a single boot system.

I thought I could use DualBootPro to manage which partition was selected as the default boot-up - seems a neat way of switching that.

I am just wondering if I am missing some fundamental issue that might screw everything up! Dual boot was never meant for 2 versions of the same OS. All input greatly appreciated!

Cheers
Adrian

 

[Saltgrass]

I do not know for sure, but I would think one installation for one license would be what Microsoft would expect.

 

[patcooke]

There may be a licensing issue which needs to be addressed but from a purely technical point of view there should be no problem doing as you suggest. You don't need to pay for something like dualbootpro - easybcd is an excellent wel established solution available free from here:

Download EasyBCD 2.0.2 - NeoSmart Technologies