Is this possible...? - SSD hosting 2 system OS's

Found out i'm getting low on disk space today, nearing 10GB left, so I'm gonna be having to get some sort of solution worked out sometime in the near future. Something that caught my interest though was the possibility of sharing a SSD between two systems. I'm hopefully going to be getting some sort of laptop finally this year, been without one for a long while and I'm going to be needing one with some very decent disk performance soon, and so far I'm going in the route of an SSD for that.

So...I'm curious, has anyone ever heard of dual booting two Windows 7 operating systems off the same drive? As in, I split the hard drive into two halves, installing Windows 7 (Ult.) on one half while it's in my desktop to configure itself for that, and installing Windows 7 (H.P.) again while it's in my laptop to configure itself for that. Whether it'll even be possible to differentiate between the two halves and make sure each system boots off the right halve I don't know, not even sure whether it's remotely possible. Help?

What about the possibility of splitting the hard drive up into 3 partitions, two for each OS, and the third to house programs? Would either OS be able to access the program partition easily, or, is that just a gigantic headache waiting to happen? Well, I know it's already a headache to setup, haha, but I definitely can't afford to get two SSDs, which is why I'm looking for this shared option.


Edited by ablahblah - 04 Apr 2011 at 9:04pm

Ehh....would this do anything?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/165467
Install the program on each side of windows to the same folder on partition 3, files remain same but installation procedures other than files (registry, etc.) occur to both sides.

I'm well aware that both OS's are hanging around in a sort of twilight zone where if the drive fails, I'm going to lose both installations, but it's just OS's and programs anyways though...can always reinstall. That drive is something that I'm really keeping only the OS and programs, both systems will still have a dedicated secondary that's a data drive. Regardless, can Acronis TrueImage backup an entire drive, partitions and all?

Edited by ablahblah - 05 Apr 2011 at 5:11pm

yep, read that, that essentially just means that I need to reinstall the app on both sides when I need to update one, right?. I think I can live with that, not too hard..