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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.

HappyNomad
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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.

Windos
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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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