Dual Booting

Well, if you go down the Win7 route for an install then regardless of IDE /Sata settings and you install it on a blank drive which in XP would normally be (lets say E:) it will revert E:\ to look like C:\. It's rather confusing, however I still have 3 hdd's in my desktop, my latest 500gb with Win7 installation and the other 2 hdd's have XP on. Dual boot doesn't anymore for some odd-reason, one I couldn't be bothered really getting into. My best guess is the fact that the new Sata drive cocked up the indexing of the other hdd's (XP) which look for C:\ and as described above, the Sata drive took priority in that so the XP ones are now D:\+E:\ but when trying to boot they just bomb out.

I can still access the data though that was all I needed.

With regards to your software installations, export your current registry from XP, tweak all the c:\ to be the new location otherwise you'll have to reinstall all the software you had installed as the registry settings will be gone on your new Win7 setup.

Only thing I can seriously think of if you're gonna want to dual boot is;
Ghost your current XP hard drive onto the new hdd THEN install Win7 on the same hdd using different folder location, dual boot should work fine then.

Yes. The old hard drive will be readable. No worries.

Marv

Yeah as Marv said, data you'll be able to access no problem.

Just a small note about SSD drives. They are very expensive as the size goes up. Also, a concern I have with SSD drives is that SSD technology has a limited Write life. They can only be written to so many times before they fail. This is how one day your cameras memory card is fine one day and the next it's gone. Now I know SSD drives are obviously built with this in mind and the technology behind them has improved, but I've heard stories of some SSD drives failing after one year. I've also heard SSD drives slow down as they fill up. And I've heard that after a year of use, the file structure on them becomes fragmented to the point where a yearly fresh installation of the OS is required.

I have experienced SSD drives and they are FAST!! BLISTERING FAST!! But speaking only for myself, I don't currently trust the technology enough to adopt it and if I was replacing the hard drive in my computer I would still go with the standard rotating disc platter model. It may not be super fast but it's reliable and considerably cheaper. Not trying to talk you out of your choice of drive, just alerting you to the issues I am aware of.

And just to answer your main question, if you install a new drive into the computer as drive C, making your old current Windows XP drive, drive D, files on both drives will be accessible from either drive, but you will only be able to boot into the Windows installation on drive C. Your old Windows XP installation on drive D will not be bootable, it will just be a Windows folder on drive D whose files you can see and access but you can't boot into. To do a dual boot system you need to partition your C drive and install both OS's onto that drive, one installation per partition.

Everyone I know that uses SSDs has a small one (64 GB, 128 GB) that the operating system and some documents run on, but they're usually accompanied with a several terabyte slave drive for any mass storage. It's much more economical than buying a large SSD.