Windows 10: Partition hard drive to install Windows 7

Hello all,

I've already upgraded to Windows 10 on my desktop PC, and there were no issues with the upgrade. However, I work from home and my work has informed me that they won't accept Windows 10, they will only accept 7 or 8.1 as their operating system (they also only accept Internet Explorer for browsing, etc.). So I can either downgrade, which I really don't want to do, buy a second PC, which I can't afford to do, or (I'm hoping) create a new partition and run Windows 7 from that.

So my question is, is it possible to create a new partition for Windows 7 while running Windows 10 on my main partition? Will I have to downgrade and install Windows 10 later? Or can I do it from Windows 10 already?

Thanks in advance for your help!

:)

 

windows-10 upgrade to a spare drive

I have two Hard-drives, Windows 7 is currently installed on drive(1), partition 'C'

On drive(0), primary partition 'D' was originally Windows-XP installed, but is now empty.

Can I install Windows-10 on Drive(0) partition 'D', and keep Windows-7 intact as is ?

And how to do this ?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Will I be able to create a bootable USB flash drive with a windows 10 "recovery partition" on it?

I currently have Windows 7 Pro installed with a recovery partition on my systems hard drive.

I wish to create a bootable USB flash drive with a windows 10 recovery partition on it so that I may remove the old windows 7 recovery partition and reclaim that hard drive space after upgrading to Windows 10.

Is windows 10 capable of doing this?

 

You can certainly use Disk Management to shrink your existing partitions and create a new NTFS partition for Win7 -- but I believe you will have (at least) two problems after that:
1) Licensing -- you can't legally reuse the same Win7 license that you used to do the upgrade to Win10. So, legally, you would have to buy another license for Win7. While the Win7 install might activate using the same license key, it's quite possible that it will be deactivated later -- but I don't think anyone has actually tested this to see if this happens.
2) Dual-booting -- when you install Win7, it's going to want to install its boot loader somewhere. When such installs were done in the past, installing a newer OS version after an older OS version was in place, Windows updated the boot loader in the older OS to include the new one, providing you a menu with both OSs. But the Win7 boot loader and Win10 boot loader are very different. IF Win7 overwrites the Win10 boot loader, its possible that Win10 won't boot anymore. But ... I've not tried this, so I don't know if it will actually be a problem.

 

Thanks for your reply! The 1st point is not an issue, I know the licensing rules and I'd obviously get a legal version of Windows 7. The 2nd point is where I'm having trouble, and you're right on point - I don't know whether installing Windows 7 on a second partition is going to mess up Windows 10's ability to boot up. I hope someone knows if that will be the case or not!

Thanks again!