Pleez help! Dual boot:Win XP & Win 7 "upgrade" question

Hi all,

This is my first post in this forum. I have tried to find the answer to my question on various forums with no definitive answer. Please shed some light if you can and know hat u are talking about.

I have a netbook running on N280 Atom with 2 GB of Ram and 2 partitioned drives at 72 GB each.

I have XP home edition installed on the C: drive and want to install Win 7 on the D: drive in order to dual boot.

The problem is that I have a Win 7 professional "upgrade" disk.

My question is: If I already have XP installed on the C: drive, will I have a problem (or is there any cons) with attempting to install Win 7 to the blank D: drive being that it's just an "upgrade" disk as opposed to a full OS disk?

Should I even try to do this?

The reason I'm even thinking of attempting this is because I get a super discount on the upgrade being that I am an adult atending a university. You cannot beat the student discount of $29.99 for Win 7 professional.

I don't want to shell out $200 for the full disk unless I absolutely have to... please help knowledgeable people!!!!!!!!!!

One problem. You talk about dual booting, but according to the license agreement you're not supposed to use XP anymore once you've used it as a basis for the upgrade.

By the way, are you sure that isn't the full version? Now that I think about it, people used the term "upgrade" with the student discount even though it was actually the full OS.

Anyhow, if you aren't worried about it possibly invalidating your copy of Windows XP, go for it and let us know how it goes.

Thanks sup3rsprt...

From what I've read on the "student website" it's just the upgrade that MS is discounting. The full OS is the same price as everyone gets it for.

you have the disc already right?

pop it in, reboot and select DVD-ROM as first boot device (to boot from the Win7 media). Then see if you can do a clean install. Because my guess is that you have the full version of Windows 7.

Ok well here's what I understnad from the forums I have read so far...

Ther basically is no real dofference from the upgrade disk and the full OS disk besides the product key you are supplied with to activate the disk you own.\

We'll see... The issue is that I just purchased a pretty cool netbook that I like, and I don't want to go ahead and even attempt to install "Win 7 upgrade" as a seperate partition unless I absolutely know for sure, or get verification fron someone knowledgeable, that it will work the way I want it to.

Which is: To be able to dual boot and have the choice to run either Win 7 or XP with no changes to the original OS.

did you boot from the DVD yet? because it's not going to hurt anything to boot from the DVD and clean install onto a separate partition.

With all due respect, I totally understand what you mean. I just want to know if that is able to be done with the Win 7 upgrade disk that I have. I know that a clean install can be done with a full win 7 OS disk.

I just need to know if the same can be accomplished on a blank partitioned drive, with a computer that currently has XP installed on a seperate partioned drive, using the "upgrade version" of Win 7 as opposed to the full version disk.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated from someone knowledgeable...

Thank you

if all you got was an upgrade disc, then you got ripped off. Because everyone else gets the full version for $29.99.

Again, with all due respect, could you please tell me where I can find the "full version" $29.99? I haven't seen that anywhere and would like to take advantage. I have not purchased the upgrade yet and would definitely rather have the full version for the same price.

Thanks for all your help.