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I have a machine with two partitions. One has Windows 7. The other (larger) is empty.

I understand those with Windows 7 SP1 can upgrade to Windows 10 for free.

I would like to keep my Windows 7 untouched and upgrade to Windows 10 on a second, local partition. I appreciate this may sound greedy!

It is my hope I can choose which OS to boot in to, from some sort of boot manager on startup (removing the need to constantly change my boot drive priority).

Is this possible/what are my best options available?

Could I clone my Windows 7 to the empty partition, boot in to that and upgrade to Win 10? And if I do this, could I still create a dual boot menu?

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  • "I understand those with Windows 7 SP1 can upgrade to Windows 10 for free." - While it's technically possible to upgrade to Windows 10 by installing Windows 10 within Windows 7. The free upgrade offer to Windows 10 technically expired more than 4 years ago.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Mar 28, 2021 at 0:00
  • Yes it is still free, I upgrade W7 to 10 all the time, but you cannot keep the old W7 installation, W7 must be upgraded wile it is booted into W7, so you lose W7, so technically it is not free.
    – Moab
    Commented Mar 28, 2021 at 1:03
  • I did this when the Windows 10 free upgrade was still promoted. I cloned Windows 7 to a second partition, booted into W7 on partition 1, used regedit to load the SYSTEM hive from partition 2 and wipe all the entries in HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices key so Windows would rebuild this when booting partition 2, used EasyBCD to edit the boot options and add an entry for partition 2. After that, I upgraded Windows 7 on partition 2 to 10, while leaving partition 1 on Windows 7. As long as the Windows 10 upgrade still works, so should this method.
    – Blaelph
    Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 0:40

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