Windows 7: separate hard drives dual boot options

I want to install 7 on a separate hard drive to see how it works & work indepenantly on it's own system. How can I if at all make it so when I am booting up I can toggle in between 7 & xp startups.
Thanks
G

Hi gtuttlepi, and welcome to sevenforums
You can install Windows 7 to either a separate hard drive, or a partition on the same hard drive as your currently installed OS and it will run independantly of the original OS.
It will also edit your boot options so that you will be able to choose the OS that you want to boot into on startup.

There is a good tutorial for doing this here: How to dual boot Windows 7 and XP (either installed first)

Have a look at these tutorials:

Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and Vista

I suggest not to touch dual boot. It`s all headaches. Disconnect the HDD that contains your current OS. Then install Windows 7 on the other HDD. The 2 systems will then be completely independent. Then reconnect the harddrive with the originall OS. When you power on, bring up the BIOS boot sequence (e.g. on an HP by tapping ESC) and set the boot sequence to the HDD where you installed Windows 7. Now it will boot Windows 7. If you do nothing, it willl boot your original OS.
The big advantage of that setup is that you need not handle the common bootrecord which can be a pain - e.g. when you uninstall one of the systems.
An aditional tip: Put all your user data (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.) into an independent partition of your original OS. When you are in Windows 7, you just include all those files into your Windows 7 libraries. Thus any updates, regardles from which OS side, will be applied and your files are always up-to-date.