Windows 7: Full or upgrade version?

I am Currently running Windows XP Pro. I know I qualify to buy the Windows7 upgrade editions. I plan to install it on a new hard drive but the old hard drive will be there for upgrade verification. What happens if I later decide to wipe out my Windows 7 installation and do a fresh install? Or if my hard drive craps out and I need to do a fresh install? At that time I will not have an activated Windows XP os. Would I be better off with a full version of Windows 7?

Hmm, good question.

As long as there is a copy of Windows on the hard drive, you'll be able to reinstall to your hearts content. If you try to install on a blank hard drive, or your hard drive kills itself in a way you can't restore it, then you'll be out of luck unless you have a backup of your hard drive somewhere.

Hello and welcome to the Forums!!

The best way to ensure that you are able to have a fresh install, is to make an image of your partition/drive as soon as you install it and have all your updates installed... Be sure to save your image to a seperate drive if possible..

See Brinks tutorial on how to do this -=> Here

Yes, I second Tews advice. Hard drives are very cheap nowadays. It's well worth it to have a cloned image of your Windows 7 installation on an extra drive stored safely somewhere, preferably not in the same location as your computer. Aside from being a great backup, you can always clone the clone to a new hard drive (say if you were upgrading to a new hard drive and the original was stolen or inoperable) and then do a clean install over it with an upgrade version, assuming you wanted a clean install rather than simply using the cloned image.