On Dec 5, 7:02*pm, "Jim Wilkins" wrote:
wrote in message

...

...
remove your W7 drive
install an old, small hd
install XP
reinstall your W7 drive and chose which drive to boot from from BIOS
*Likely the best answer, given the application

XP and 7 could be installed on interchangeable HDD sleds that pop into a
case in a CD bay. Plug in the drive with the OS you want to boot. I put
older Acronis backups on them and use them as restore points when testing
downloaded software. They are unlikely to work properly on a different PC,
even of the same model.

I've set up my laptop to multiboot four ways, from the C: drive, a USB
stick, a CD/DVD and the F12 key (by hacking the Utility partition).

jsw

This is what I do. There exist multi-bay racks for bare SATA drives,
usually three SATA drives fitting into two half-height 5 1/4" bays.
Or, if you want to play this way, two 2.5" SATAs into one 3 1/2" bay.
Smaller laptop drives are ridiculously cheap these days. I normally
use a 30 gig or so partition on the boot drive, and a monster drive
for data. The third slot is used for image backups on a stack of
backup drives.

You can do the same with IDE drives, which I was doing previously, but
they rely on a sled and bay arrangement, none of which are standards.
So you end up buying as many sets as you have drives. Can get
expensive unless you get them used. Usually the sled to bay connector
is what gives up, along with the midget fans they use.

Acronis takes about 5 minutes to backup the boot drive this way, makes
for fast and more frequent backups. If a boot drive dies, I just pop
in the latest backup and soldier on.

This works for other operating systems and other versions of Windows
as well. I don't like dual-boot software arrangements on principle, I
still remember booting up NT 4 on a dual boot machine once and having
it nail 3 other drives on the system.
Took the better part of a week to get the system restored. They
usually work, until the boot sector or boot driver gets munged, then
you have a real fun time restoring.

I've also uised VirtualBox off off virtualbox.org, this is head and
shoulders above anything MS is giving away. It allows USB access and
shared folders between the virtual machine and the host. Good for
testing boot images before burning
onto CD/DVD. However, it probably won't allow direct hardware access
as the O.P. wants. A dedicated box is probably the simpler route. If
access between boxes is needed, ethernet hubs are cheap.

Stan