After my impatience got the best of me yesterday, and I dumped the latest version of PC-BSD from its half of the dual boot setup on here, I decided to put Windows 8 back, and rather impetuously stuffed its DVD into the drive. It is a 64-bit system, but the Windows 7 on here is only 32-bit, and you can't upgrade one of those with the other. They have to be the same. I didn't want to do that anyway, but no matter. The Windows 8 DVD took a look around and told me it couldn't be installed, because it was not compatible with installed files.
But I'd had it on here in a dual boot arrangement before.... and then the light came on: I'd forgotten to go into the BIOS and reset that so the DVD Player would be the choice for first boot, and the regular drive would be second. By booting up from the DVD, it then took another look around, saw two partitions, one of which was empty, and asked me which I wanted to use for Windows 8. Naturally I chose the empty one, and now I have Windows 8 Pro back on the drive in a dual boot with Windows 7.
The stuff you may see about installing or upgrading to Windows 8 tells us that it can only be used as an upgrade over an existing Windows operating system, but that's not entirely correct, because it will install onto an empty partition on your drive if you have one created for it, and if you first of all go into your BIOS during a boot cycle, and change the order of booting from the regular drive to the DVD one, so that the new program's installation disk does the booting. Just don't forget to change that back to the normal drive afterward. And now, I have to finish adding programs to Windows 8.
One nice thing about that is that with both Windows 7 and Windows 8 on the same drive, they both list their contents in Windows Explorer (or as Windows 8 calls it File Explorer) so you can copy stuff from one operating system into the other.
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