One of my PCs was running Win7-64. I purchased a Win8 Upgrade and decided to dual-boot and installed it to do so. I have relatives that are running Win 8.x and, as many here may be familiar, I have to de-facto support their computers, etc. since I'm the one with more experience. Anyway, when the free Win10 upgrade nagging began I decided to upgrade my Win8 partition to Win10. Currently I'm running a dual boot of Win7-64 and Win10-64 on that machine. I honestly don't know if that's legal or not. While questionable, I've seen nothing to say it isn't and I've spent some time looking.

What's interesting is that when I boot to the Win7-64 partition I still get the Win10 Upgrade nagging. My intent is to slowly migrate things to Win10 with some testing. Once all's working well I'll wipe the Win7 partition and have Win10 as the only OS on the PC, expanding it's partition.

From my current "moral" perspective, I don't think I have issues with dual-boot, especially since I don't intend to keep my old versions of Windows in the long term. Were I to use the Win10 upgrade advertised on my Win7 partition and end up with two Win10 partitions I would consider that a problem. Were I to start creating Win10 VMs on that machine I would definitely say I should have a new license for each.

Hope that rambling made sense!

And for anyone looking to dual-boot I just found this: http://www.howtogeek.com/197647/how-to-dual-boot-windows-10-with-windows-7-or-8/

Peronsally, I just downloaded the upgrade and told it to install on an open partition I had previously created. No issues.

Thinking...thinking...decisions...decisions.

You can't clean install (for free) until you have upgraded THAT machine. Once upgrade has been done on a machine, you can roll back and dual boot a clean install of 10, or wipe drive and clean install 10.  You CANNOT use a Windows 7 key, or a Windows 8 key to clean install Windows 10. It doesn't work that way. Not even AFTER upgrading.

After a Win10 upgrade, you may cleam install Win10, for free, on the same rig, and choose SKIP both times you are asked to enter a key. Once installed, Windows 10 will activate. (Must be on the same rig you previously upgraded.)

Yes, you need multiple licenses to multi boot.

One common misconception is that once you upgrade a 7 or 8 rig to 10, your 7 or 8 key is no longer valid. This is incorrect. Windows10 does not change or use your 7 or 8 key, it simply replaces it.

You can still use your 7 or 8 key after upgrading to 10.

Why would that be illegal?

It has been my experience, Ross, that in a triple or dual boot involving Windows7, 7 must be installed first. Otherwise you have to use a program to rebuild the MBR, in order to successfully boot the multiple OSes.

I use EasyBCD.

Quote:

EasyBCD is a powerful bootloader-modification tool that has a wide-range of applications and usages. It can perform a variety of tasks ranging in complexity and application from the most basic to advanced and highly-customizable features.

Please use EasyBCD with care, it’s a powerful tool that you can either make your life a lot easier or make it rather miserable by letting you shoot yourself in the foot.

EasyBCD is free for personal use at home.

http://neosmart.net/wiki/easybcd/  

You also need to be sure not to install 10 as an EFI OS, Windows7 does not support EFI and won't boot if the newer OS is installed in EFI mode.

Well, MS has changed the rules on me. What I said above in reply 24 WAS true.

But I just got upgraded to the latest release of Win10, and found this out.

Note

• Starting with the November Update, Windows 10 (Version 1511) can be activated using some Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 product keys. For more info, see the section Activating Windows 10 (Version 1511 or higher) using a Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1 product key in this topic.

Link to article:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/activation-in-windows-10 

the november update (threshold 2) allows people to clean install (w/o upgrading 1st) with a win 7/8 key. or at least that's the theory... hence my comment

(hey.. could have sworn i didn't see your reply there )

ps... supposedly win10 newcomers (that is.. those who upgraded before threshold 2 came out)  won't get threshold 2 until 30 days (or was it 31?) after their upgrade (as it'll wipe their restore to win 7->8 thingy)... and getting threshold 2 will reset certain settings, maybe even revert some drivers to default ms ones.....

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/11/14/make-sure-to-check-default-apps-and-settings-after-the-recent-windows-10-update/

i'll have to go through a clean install soon.... fingers crossed.

I have Win 8.1 and I book marked the link from how-to-geek about dual booting with Win 10 and 8.1. It seems pretty straight forward but my concern is will Win 10 interfere or break anything on 8.1 even though its on a separate partition. Considering all the nonsense with the new OS I've come not to trust MS at all. Another concern are the drivers. All of mine have been updated to the newest versions from the mfr's website. They're all pretty much generic, no fancy nVidia or any of that stuff. If Win 10 imports its own its could screw things up royally. Good thing I got plenty of backups, redundancy is a good thing. 

Dual, Triple boot, nah. You guys have recognized that Hyper-V ist built in since 8 ?

I have a new, larger, SSD on the way. The old 128Gb SSD just wasn't big enough, I had to store a lot of stuff on another drive.

Once I've got the boot media on a USB I'll be clean installing W10 to the new drive

Windows 10 update today......there were actually some GUI changes. I'm glad they held off on WB 10 because the OS is obviously still being tweaked.

128 is a bit small. I have a 256 GB SSD on this lappy and I still have to be careful not to install to much crap.

There shouldn't be any reason to be unclear about the revenue stream. Yes MS gave Windows 10 upgrades away for free, but only to people running Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. If you had Vista or XP then you were out of luck. If you had Linux or OSX, then you didn't get it for free.

Android, iOS and some form of yet to be deployed cloud computing (wirelessly attach a keyboard, mouse and monitor/tv/vr display to your cloud watch and then it streams everything to the servers, including 4k/8k games) are threats to windows in the future. However, older versions of windows are the biggest current obstacles for Microsoft moving forward and innovating so it can compete with those other platforms. According to the July 2014 Steam Survey, Windows 7 64 bit was on 49.92% of Steam computers, and this is two years after Windows 8 had came out.

Even with the October 2015 Steam Survey you get

Windows 7 64bit - 36.67%

Windows 7 32bit - 8.19%

Windows XP 32bit - 2.26%

Despite the free upgrade and Microsoft pushing hard windows 10 64bit is only 26.42% (windows 10 32bit is 1%)

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTQwNzM1MzEyMHFVRXF1Z0pSUUZfMV8yX2wuanBn

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

It will only help Microsoft by upgrading every possible computer to windows 10, especially when it can help leverage its windows 10 user base to get developers to create Windows 10 universal Apps which will run on PCs Windows 10 phones and even the Xbox One. Just this week, windows 10 had it's fall upgrade, the Xbox One upgraded to the New Xbox One Experience, which means a new UI and Windows 10 on the Xbox (giving MS another 10+ million windows 10 devices) and Windows 10 mobile will launch in the next month. I think Microsoft gave up between 500 million to 2 billion in upgrade revenue to push the windows ecosystem forward.

Though Microsoft also shot itself in the foot with the privacy options and lack of update notes. I use Windows 10 and think it is a better OS than 8.1 or 7 and I get what Microsoft is trying to do, but they really hurt themselves with those two things. Besides those two complains all I hear is that some older hardware may give people trouble and then the media center faithful are highly upset about not having an upgrade path on windows 10.

c242

reply 29

Dual, Triple boot, nah. You guys have recognized that Hyper-V ist built in since 8 ?

A VM isn't QUITE the same as a full install, IMHO, YMMV.

I installed a 240 in my Dell lappy, removed the optical drive, and added a HDD caddy with a 1 TB HDD, so I have all the room I need.

I have not yet upgraded from W7 to W10.  One thing for sure, I don't have time for a clean install and then reinstalling all my software unless I want to spend a few hours a day for a couple of weeks.  I wish there was a program that really did clean an installed system as those registry cleaners purport to do.  My experience is they clean up plenty they shouldn't be touching resulting in having to reinstall software anyway.  Even CCleaner (some version back) deleted all my restore points.

I tried Windows 10 but no win 10 drivers were available for my laptop at HP website. So it started to heat upto 65-70°C when idle. I switched back to Win 7 now its fine. 

According to what you said, that Win10 does not replace your old key and the old key is still usable, there is nothing illegal about retaining the original Winx partition and dual-booting to the new Win10 partition. I haven't had anyone clarify that for me before. So thanks!

If you're willing to try it again - and I understand if you aren't - many recommend the Win8.x drivers if the mfr hasn't released Win10 drivers. Good luck!

If you're looking at buying another HD/SSD anyway, why not install it as a 2nd drive and have the Win10 upgrade install there? You'll have dual-boot and can revert at any time, migrating your programs over as you wish. Just a thought.

Thx for the info. coquegsm