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I own a Toshiba Satellite laptop that originally came with Windows 7 on it. I currently have Windows 8 installed only (no other OSs on other partitions). I am a software developer and would like to test my app on Windows 7. So I'd like to reintroduce a Windows 7 partition without disturbing the present Windows 8 partition.

The Toshiba-provided disks I have are System Recovery disks, Windows Recovery Environment, and Applications & Drivers. I read about "recovery" in the computer's manual, but it just mentions wiping the 'C' drive and then restoring it to the "out of box" state. This is definitely not what I want. I want to create a new partition that has Windows 7 on it while leaving the present Windows 8 partition alone. Please advise me how to accomplish this.

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  • You persist on using real hw or virtual machine will suffice?
    – week
    Nov 8, 2012 at 3:03
  • I had thought (hoped) that they had stopped doing that - wiping the entire disk. It has been a long time since I saw it. Can you try on another PC and see what it does? If it does, then what about the Windows 8 install? Does that format the entire drive? If not, back up up your data, install 7 (formtatting the entire drive), create a new parition and install 8 to that. Or just buy a second PC? If you want to develop for the touchscreen aspects of 8 you will porbably have to buy a new device anyway in order to test.
    – Mawg
    Nov 8, 2012 at 3:04

2 Answers 2

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What you will most likely have to do, if the restore disk is your only available method of installing Windows 7, is to go through with the restore. This WILL wipe the HDD and any data on it.

Once the system is back to factory, shrink and do what ever else you need/want to do with your partitions and install Windows 8 on it's own partition.

n.b. this is assuming you actually have a full install of Windows 8 and not just an upgrade.

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  • Thanks but this doesn't answer my question since I do not want to disturb the Windows 8 partition. If wiping turns out to be necessary, then I'd instead prefer buying a cheap Windows 7 machine to test on.
    – HappyNomad
    Nov 8, 2012 at 3:19
  • You could always just buy a Windows 7 DVD of what ever edition is sufficient for your needs and install that on a second partition, or better yet inside a Virtual Machine.
    – Windos
    Nov 8, 2012 at 3:20
  • This article seems to provide an alternative to buying the DVD: pcworld.com/article/248995/…
    – HappyNomad
    Nov 8, 2012 at 3:26
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A possible solution would be to restore your Windows 7 installation and then use Disk2vhd or a number of other methods to convert a physical machine into a Hyper-V, VMware or other virtual machine.

You can then install Windows 8 without the Windows 7 partition. You can run your Windows 7 VM using Windows 8's built in Hyper-V or boot directly into the VHD.

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