Keep in mind, this is on one machine only.
Along with the 'Unique Identifier' and the 'Lifetime of the Device' rule, you won't be able to take whatever Product Key and the ISO, if available, and install it on any machine.
That's why I'd rather slip em a few bucks and obtain as many Keys as I desire.
When 10 is officially out, I will upgrade a clone of my 7 and use them alternately (is that a word?) on the same machine. That is not illegal right? SAME machine. It's not like I can use them at the same time. It's only one or the other. It's like rolling back every now and then. As far as I know, we can rollback anytime just not sure if it only applies to the tech preview.
badrobot,
What you said above has always been a gray area even though some would disagree with that. I can tell you it won't work even with Grubs boot manager 2.0 help. How do I know that, just out of curiosity I tried a similar method to what you wanted to do. During upgrade it keeps the current boot record. Which makes it impossible to use the upgraded operating system on another primary partition, I would also doubt you could do a clean re-install of windows 7 without effecting the Windows 10 partition that was upgraded. So it looks like you have to buy Windows full retail if you want to dual or triple boot. One note, it doesn't effect the logical partitions, my Linux operating system still worked.
The grub issue is the easiest to fix. Incidentally, when I read about this thread, I went ahead and upgraded a cloned copy of my Windows 7 to Windows 10 build 9926 last night. I recorded everything on video and I am thinking I should post it here for you to see that IT WORKS. When I first popped the Windows 7 clone, I encountered a grub issue. That's because I already tried the upgrade before with build 9860. The grub issue was fixed in about a minute and then proceeded with the 9926 upgrade which took about 45 minutes to complete. Then I just had a quick check if the Windows 7 installed apps are still working and they are fine. Then I rolled it back again to Windows 7 in just under 5 minutes like nothing happened. Total time I spent from fixing the grub, to Win 10 9926 upgrade, to rolling back again to Windows 7 is around 1 hour. I will try to put up the video together and post it on Youtube and show it here. And probably you can pick something up there how to fix a grub problem in less than a minute. :)
The most important step in upgrading a clone copy of the OS is to make sure that the other hard drive with the original OS is disconnected from the computer to avoid the bootloader issue.
And NO. I DON'T DO DUAL BOOT. I just select a boot drive (F9 key) on start up. Very easy.
badrobot
Oh, I think I see what you did. You did kind of the reverse what I did. Hmm I am wandering if I should of tried bcdboot /fixboot and bcdboot /fixmbr using windows 10 install disk then reinstall grub 2.0. When I booted to windows 7, it gave a bunch of errors, but I was able to get back to windows 10 using diskpart and select the active partition. Windows 10 booted without issue.
Edwin
This is ok once windows 10 release? Same hard drive, Same computer.
Windows 10 upgraded from windows Primary partition one
Windows 7 same version that was used to upgraded to Windows 10 on Primary partition two
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