On installing Windows 7 Beta as a 2nd operating system in a blank partition, I had a dual boot option, but when I clicked on "previous operating system", I was put into the Recovery Console. Clicking the "recovery console" caused the computer to hang. Thus, I would have lost the ability to boot my Vista OS except for the fact that I use BootItNG and was able to reenable its boot options. If I had not had the recovery console installed, I cannot say whether the same thing would have happened. Strangely enough, the Recovery console was installed in my previous WinXP system, not in Vista and Windows 7 supposedly overwrote that partition to install. I'm not sure how this could have occured, unless Windows 7 installs its own recovery console.