i have a seperate boot drive thats only 80gb and is usually max 20gb full. i know i could use a partition manager and split the drive into say 2 40gb partitions and clone the boot partion to the second partion, and presumably the second cloned parition wouldn't be able to boot unless i used a utility to change the boot loader (does anyone know one that would work?). the OS in question is XP (pro i think, but could be home, it's 32bit)

from then, on the second partition (with the newly cloned data), can i install windows 7 (32bit) as an upgrade so it keeps my programs and settings etc and works properly? i thought that the installation of win7 would create the necessary boot manager to allow me to boot either xp or win7, even if i hadn't used a boot manager utility to let me boot between both xp partitions

this would then let me boot into either xp or win7 and have all my programs available and settings the way i want them etc (if it works). will this work? as to why, no real reason other than to try it and see how win7 will perform on the hardware and ensure that there are no driver issues with an old/weird setup. the processor doesn't support visualization so i can't run xp within win7. i'm sure there might be a few questions as to why would i want to do that, and the answer is "just cuz i can" (that's if i can). if win7 works fine after a few days/weeks testing then i presume i could just delete the xp partition and use a boot manager if necessary and regain/expand the space on the drive

or having two installed and working xp partitions might be handy if xp screws up and i can boot to the second install and keep on working without having to reinstall/ghost back (i could do this at a later time)

any thoughts? its a p4 3ghz with hyperthreading and 2gb ram (that's the most it will take)