Like others who are migrating from XP to Windows 7, I have many programs that may take a while to migrate, so I need to keep the XP environment intact. I have been dual-booting, but that is becoming inconvenient. I would like to virtualize the XP partition, so it can run as a VM within Windows 7.
When using VMware Converter, does it make a copy of the partition which then becomes the virtual machine? (thus requiring additional space equal to the XP partition size) Or is there an option to "virtualize in place", using the partition that XP is currently installed into?
Is this virtualization process a one-way trip? I can see if a copy is made, then there are effectively two XP systems, which would eventually get out of "sync". If the actual partition is virtualized, then any changes made to allow it to run virtualized would probably have to be undone to allow it to boot natively.
Are there any practical methods to allow running an XP partition as a virtual machine, as well as retaining the ability to boot directly into the original XP partition if needed?