Windows 7: New machine and wanting to Dual Boot Win Xp and Win 7 on 2 drives

I have my laptop running a dual boot between XP and Win 7 - can't remember how I managed to do it as I followed a "how to" that found through Google...

Well I use VMware Player on PCs and their Fusion program on Mac OS X and it use to have an option to Migrate a working install of XP into a Virtual Machine. But the newest version of there Player software, which is free and for Non Commercial use, seems to have removed that option.

You could try their VMware Workstation 9 program, I believe there is a free trial version, to do the migration then uninstall the Workstation version and install the free Player and open the migrated XP install virtual machine in Player.

Best to look at the help system of the VM program you use for the proper steps to do the migration.

What version of the VM Player are you running ,, a friend has a bunch of these programs , maybe he has that one as well.

Would i just be able to add the drive that Xp is on now to the machine and be able to see it but not boot to it? What i mean is , have it used as a storage drive so that i could move over folders, pictures , music etc? Like a slave drive.

Yes you can. I do it myself. However, all my HDDs are SATA and use the same connectors. If your old HDD is EIDE you might need to purchase an adapter to hook it up to your new system.

Its a SATA drive as well ,, would i have to set to slave , or do you have to do that now with the newer drives?

Nope. There are no settings like that for SATA HDD's You would just need to have a slot in your case and SATA and power cable available to hook the drive up. If you don't have available cables you can buy them. They aren't that expensive.

One other thing. Most modern motherboards have a fair number of SATA ports and your current HDD is probably hooked up to SATA port 0.

Being hooked up to SATA port 0 , does that have to be the same on the new machine? Where would the HDD that i'm going to install Windows 7 on be put on , port wise? How do i figure out which port is which , they are just labelled on the mobo as 1-6.

Sorry for the confusion. If your SATA ports are labeled 1-6, then the HDD that has the Windows OS will probably be hooked up to SATA port 1 and it is set as your primary boot disk in the system bios. You can use any of the other SATA ports available to hook the old HDD up to, but leave the HDD with Windows hooked up where it is.

Thanks for the clarification , i guess that i'll skip the dual boot and go with a clean install of 7 and using the Xp HDD as a storage disk for now while i pull off the files i want and importing my emails etc.