Right now I have my old XP OS on one hard drive and my new Win 7 on another with dual boot capability. Would it be possible to to restore an image of my Win 7 drive over the XP drive and retain the ability to dual boot? If not, could it be done with a clean install of Win 7 over XP? I'm using Daz's loader to activate my Win 7 if this makes any difference.
XP Drive 0 7 Drive 1. You want to move 7 Drive 1 to XP Drive o ? yes you can, but you need to ghost/make image of Drive 1 and then restore to drive 0. Altho i prefer e fresh reinstall of 7 which is best ofcourse but its up to each and everyone.
Dual booting occurs when a installer see two OS's on two partitions. If you have XP on a partition and install Win7,Vista,Linux on another partition, the installer will create the dual boot code in the loader area. You should be able to image you second Win7 over XP as all the loader code will reside either in the Win7 area or the 100 meg partition hidden in the begininning of the drive for loaders and other boot tools. There is Boot manager software that will manage this for you but, it is not necessary. Search Acronis Boot Manager, and to correct a Win7 boot manager issues use EasyBCD from neosmart_dot_net. I use EasyBCD personally, it is in my toolkit.
Am I right in assuming you want to get rid of XP ? If so your question has been answered - create image and restore to XP partition - you may need to tinker with boot to get both to work so get EasyBCD if this becomes an issue. I'm not sure if Acronis have released a Windows 7 compatible OS Boot Manager yet. A lot of backup programs can do this for you - some free.
Yes you will be fine but if for some reason you can only boot into one insert your win7 install disk and select "Repair," let it do the automated repair and tell it to fix any and all boot issues. After that you should be able to boot into both of them.
Acronis True Image Home 2010 has been compatible to Windows 7. I'm using XP and Win7 on two HDD too. But I install each OS on HDD 0 and 1 separately, choose boot device from Boot Device Sequence Posting Message of mainboard while power-on.
I was waiting for OS Selector to be updated to recognize 7 - looks like I'll have to follow Mudcrab's thread on how to force it to recognize 7 as Vista. Dumb thing for Acronis to do IMHO.