Installing Dual Boot

Hey guys, I'm new here and I was wondering what would be the best option for me. Let me elaborate my situation to you:

I just bought a SSD Vortex 60 GB and what I want to do is install windows 7 on it.
The problem is: I already have a 1TB HDD installed with windows 7 which is set as master and currently has over 600 GB of files.
Since I don't have an external hard drive that is big enough to backup my HDD or use a different drive to back it up, I thought: Why not perform a dual boot? The thing is: I still want to be abled to access my HDD even though I'm inside the SSD operating system.
Also: can I set my SSD as master and my current HDD as slave without causing any issues?
What would be the best option for me? I DON'T want to reinstall all my programs, I'm too lazy to do so.

EDIT: Isn't there a way of backing up only the registry, installed programs and not the files stored on my HDD? As in: being abled to reinstall windows 7 on my SSD with all the programs, registry, programdata, application data and what not without having to backup the rest of the 550 GB unnessecary files?
Isn't there some kind of freeware that is abled to create backups of the things that I've mentioned? I can't imagine that the only possible backup would be a backup of my ENTIRE hard drive instead of only a part of it...
Is it possible to use ROBOCOPY for this?

EDIT2:
Since I couldn't find an answer to the above questions I'm gonna reinstall all the programs from my original HDD on my SSD
I'm gonna try the following:
1. Remove my original HDD from my computer.
2. Set my SSD as Master
3. Install windows 7 on SSD
4. Attach original HDD as slave
5. Boot into windows 7 on SSD
6. Remove everything that is associated with the installation of windows 7 on my original HDD while maintaining data

Will step 4 and 5 give any issues?
How would I be abled to perform step 6? Also: can this do any harm to my data on my original HDD?

 

Sounds like a plan. Just do it slowly since you still have plenty of space already on that drive becsue as TerryNet points out, it is very easy to remove something that you later want to have back.

But do you really have an IDE SSD drive? You keep mentioning "master" and "slave", but that would only be for IDE drives. Do you mean "system", or "main", or "primary" drive and "secondary", or "data", or "extra" drive, or do you really have an IDE SSD?

 

Sorry I'm not so famillair with hard drives yet, I don't know a lot about RAID or IDE or whatever, I usually just put it in and see if it works I'm more of a software guy A friend told me that when I want to install a second hard drive as my primary OS I need to put my original hard drive as a slave and the new one as master. Are you saying that this does not have to be done with an SSD?

I have a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD

Specs?

Size: 99.88 X 69.63 X 9.3mm
Operating Temp: 0°C ~ + 55°C
Max Performance: Read: Up to 535MB/s
(ATT0) Write: Up to 480MB/s
4KB Random Write Aligned:
(Iometer 2008) Up to 60,000 IOPS
Shock Resistance:
1500G, 0.5ms
Vibration:
20G Peak, 10~20KHz with 3 axis
MTBF:
2,000,000 hrs

supports the following:
SATA III (6 Gbps)
Sandforce® Driven
MLC Flash Memory
TRIM Support

60GB

Anything I left out?