How to use my old WinXP HDD as a virtual machine on Win2008?

Question

I had WinXP installed on my HDD, and everything was good.

Now for a particular project I needed to run Win 2008 server. So I got myself a new HDD, installed Win2008 on that, and everything works fine.

But I still want to get access to everything in my old WinXP environment. How do I convert my old environment, on the old HDD, into a virtual machine that I can run through Hyper-V?

Let me also say this: I would ideally like to be able to work directly on my original HDD, not on a copy. So if for whatever reason I decide to boot up into WinXP instead of Win2008, I will see any changes made while running the virtual machine reflected directly on the original WinXP installation.

Answer 1

It is very difficult to transfer a working windows xp installation to a virtual machine. Specialised software are available from e.g. VMWare.

• http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ VMWare converter, able to convert a physical machine into a virtual machine

Note that VMWare player (and server) is free but workstation is not.

You can also consider VirtualBox (Free as in freedom and in beer)

• http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows This shows how to move a physical machine into a virtualbox machine