Can I use a real harddrive as "virtual media"?

[Seikilos]

I have installed Windows 7 and have a fully working harddrive still in the system from which I could boot my old Win XP.
Since I need to transfer data from old XP to new W7 I have too boot the OS.
My question: Can I somehow use an entire real harddrive as virtual media, so that Virtual Box really boots my existing XP into the VM?

If no, any tipps how to do that?

[Perryg]

See Chapter 9.5. Advanced storage configuration in your VirtualBox Users Guide.

[Seikilos]

Thanks for the hint, but does the warning ther imply that I should not do that since it may corrupt my data on the physical drive?

[Perryg]

The warning is what it is. Telling you that if you mess it up then you are the one that did it.
This is only suggested for someone that really understands computers, virtualization and knows how to be careful.
While there are a few that are using this approach you need to be sure that you know what you are doing.

[mpack]

Thanks for the hint, but does the warning ther imply that I should not do that since it may corrupt my data on the physical drive?

No offense, but if you need to ask that question then you should not use the feature. Corruption is practically guaranteed if you let two operating systems be in change of the same physical disk at the same time.

Why not simply run "Disk2VHD" on the old XP drive? That way you will have a fully virtual disk image that you can move around at will, and I believe Win7 lets you browse the contents. Meanwhile you can reformat the old physical drive and use it for storage - or better yet replace it with a much bigger drive which you can use to store big files like that one.