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Install On A Different Partition
The most basic way to get 7 running on the same machine as XP is to install 7 in parallel -- i.e., a dual-boot arrangement. This allows you to switch as needed between both operating systems -- you have a clean install of 7 which you can migrate data into and install applications on, and you have your old XP install which you can continue to run for the sake of whatever backwards compatibility might be needed.
The catch for this is simple: you can't install running copies of XP and 7 on the same disk partition. They have to be on different partitions, or on completely different physical drives altogether.
There's a couple of ways to approach this. If you've been meaning to drop the money for a new hard drive at some point, this is as good an excuse as any to do it: you can install the new drive as a primary drive (the first one polled for booting), place 7 there, and boot back to the secondary (XP) drive as needed. Most late-model computers let you choose which device to boot from without having to fiddle with things in BIOS; my own desktop PC and notebook let you do this by tapping F12 during startup. Once the migration was complete I set the second drive to be to the default boot drive, and that was that.
Another option is to simply repartition your existing drive, although this can be intimidating for a less technical user -- and the long-term consequences of this arrangement can be a little tricky. If you resize your existing XP partition and install a Windows 7 partition in the empty space, it'll work -- up until the point you decide to remove the XP partition entirely. Since the entire system's boot information was contained in the XP partition, guess what? You've now got an unbootable system.
To fix that, you'll need to resize the Windows 7 partition to fill the empty space (best to do this part now), and use the Windows 7 install media to repair the boot information. The Windows 7 boot-repair system is semi-automatic: If you boot the install media and select "Repair your computer," the system will be scanned to determine what's broken. The "Startup Repair" option in "System Recovery Options" runs more repair functions automatically, and at the end generates a log of all changes made.
Incidentally, the software used to resize the partition can be one of a number of things. I've long been a fan of Terabyte Unlimited's BootIt Next Generation, which can perform non-destructive resizing of NTFS partitions and do all kinds of other manipulations that normally aren't possible.
Install On The Same Partition >>
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