I think I know the answer to this but would feel better hearing it from the experts here. I have a full Acronis backup image of my hard drive. If I format the drive and install Blue Dragon's Win 7 Ultimate and use Daz's loader, and for some reason things don't work, can I just boot with the Acronis boot disk and restore my XP imaged drive?
Not sure who Blue Dragon is or what his ISO is but I'd use RTM here and then daz loader is simple and can be uninstalled no problem. Yes cloned hdd of the original OS work. Don't know why it wouldn't if your using it now and it's an exact copy. MS also has a vrtual XP mode for windows 7 for those who still need XP for whatever reasons.
May I point out too that the XP mode you mentioned is only for Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise. It does not work on Home Premium or lower though.
If you have Acronis TrueImage 2010 you can use their Boot Sequence Manager to add a backup image to your boot list and boot from it to confirm backup integrity - needs 7's virtual disk boot support though so no go until you install 7 but when you do you can confirm that the image is good and then delete it cause you ain't goin' back to XP - trust me on that one.
Blue Dragon is the guy who sent me over here when I asked him questions about his Windows posts in alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc.os. He posted both x86 & x64 versions of Ultimate that passed a hashcheck, so I'm assuming that they are good. Thanks to you and sam3971 for the responses. I do have XP Pro SP 3
The only reason I can think of to go back would be Microsoft somehow invalidating my OS since Im not able to use SLIC BIOS modification.