I have been contemplating this for a while now. I have an older laptop that I would like to get running again but I am not sure if the problem is a failed HDD or another problem. So to test if the hard drive is the issue I was going to split my current HDD into two partitions ( I lack an extra hard drive to test on) then install the same hard drive into the other laptop then install an OS to determine if the laptop will run stable. Has anyone else done something similar to this or would I run into major problems having 2 partitions with two separate MBR on one HDD?
I have done this with two computers. The one computer had a failed HDD so I split my HDD into two to see if the computer itself was fine and I run into no problems at all. Not sure if I misunderstood what you were asking but from my experience with a similar problem I had no issues.
Hope this helped.
Oh yes that is what I am trying to do, thank you very much for your reply it was reassuring!