Side-by-Side OS install XP and W7?

[fab]

I have a spare disk in my machine that has plenty capacity to hold a complete windows 7 OS. Right now, under windows XP, it is my "H:" drive.

Q1: Is it possible, and sensible, for me simply to perform a clean install from scratch of W7 on that "H:" drive, leaving my current XP OS alone on what is now my "C:" drive?

The idea is that I would continue to operate my XP system from my current "C:" drive and the other drives which it expects to be there until I have successfully installed W7 and re-installed all of my application software on the "H:" drive. Then I would have to transfer all of the non-program files into the new W7 system before I would finally undo the XP system and re-assign drive letter designations, making the new W7 OS disk the new "C:' drive.

Q2: Are there any gremlins or goblins in trying to do something this rational?
Q3: ... or has Microsoft anticipated a strategy like this and made it not workable somehow?

The alternative version is:
After bringing up W7 and all of my existing apps on my "H:" drive...

Q4: ... is there a way for me to 'import' all of my non-program information from its XP incarnation to its new W7 incarnation? It seems that this is what the Windows Easy Transfer should do for me.

Q5: Is that right?

I guess I am presuming that both the XP OS and the W7 OS would be able to 'see' and access all of the other drives in my system.

Q6: Is there a problem with this assumption?

 

[Nibiru2012]

Probably the best way to do this is to set your H drive a the first boot hard drive in the BIOS, then install Windows 7 to it.

Windows 7 will automatically name that drive the C drive. It's just the nature of the beast.

You can import your files, documents, audio, photo, pdf, etc. files into Windows 7. You can access them from Windows 7 without having to import.

I'm not sure if there will be a conflict or not. You can do a dual-boot setup

Here's a good tutorial on how to do it:

How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista