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Good day,

I have a new laptop onto which I want to install 2 separately licensed copies of Windows 7. One is for work (active directory group policies are enforced), and the other is for personal use. I own the laptop, so there are no concerns with respect to privacy, ownership, etc.

Additionally, I know I could sandbox one inside the other using VMware or something similar, but this is not an option, given the requirements of my client.

My best guess is to setup two partitions with GPartEd (NTFS), and then install Windows 7 twice, once per partition. After that, I think it's just a matter of editing my boot.ini file, but I'm not 100% sure. I've done dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows 7 before, but in that case I just used Ubuntu's bootloader, which was quite friendly. I don't even know if the Windows 7 bootloader supports multiple installations of a Windows OS. If that's the case, would I possibly have to install the two copies of Windows 7, and then a different bootloader (ie: GRUB, LILO)?

Thank you all in advance for your time and assistance.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com May 14 '12 at 13:46

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Windows 7 includes partition resizing, even for the boot partition, from within Disk Management, or from the command line using DiskPart.

You can also install multiple copies of Windows 7 into separate partitions and the appropriate boot entries will be automatically added for you.

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Thank you. I will have this moved to SuperUser as well. –  Dogbert May 14 '12 at 0:45
Neato. Popular question. +1'ing your answer, which I should have done in the first place when accepting it. Cheers! –  Dogbert Jan 29 '13 at 17:21

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