Dual Booting windows 7 with an existing windows xp drive

You can install Windows 7 on the same drive if you can make enough free space on it. This requires that the hard drive be large enough and that you have a utility to shrink the XP partition. That's a bit complicated. You might install another hard drive in the same machine and install Windows 7 on that. Thus, you'd have both OSs on one machine and you could set it up as dual boot. The other is to use XP mode in Windows 7. You'd need the higher end Windows 7 products...Pro and up, the software download from Microsoft and a processor that was capable of visualization. You didn't mention anything about the hardware so about all I can offer are those three possibilities.

Make sure your system can manage a multiboot (running two OS on your partitioned drive) and follow this guide: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Install-more-than-one-operating-system-multiboot.

Good Luck!
Tara

1.) The existing XP hard drive may fail to boot if being run from a computer with a different hardware configuration than the one that the installation of XP was created on. There is no workaround if this happens, with a 50/50 chance of success.

2.) You should use a program such as VistaBootPRO or Easy BCD to edit the Windows 7 BCD store, creating a new entry for the copy of XP. This is required as neither Windows 7 nor Windows XP will automatically recognize the other and create a dual-boot setup.

3.) Just to test if it works, disconnect the Windows 7 HDD and place the XP drive in its stead, ensuring the computer is unplugged while you do so. If XP boots and works "out of the box," let him get his work done before attempting to finalize the dual-boot setup.

4.) If you have Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate, or a retail XP CD, you can always create a virtual machine running XP within Windows 7. The former permits you to use XPMode while the latter requires you to set up your own VM using VirtualPC, VirtualBox, or another VM application.

Hope this helps,
John