virtualbox.org

I have looked and found some posts on this. I know its not a good idea to run XP that is already installed on a hard drive on a virtual machine but this is why I want to do it.

I would like to boot a virtual machine off a hard drive that has XP installed on it so that I can repair the operating system and clean it of any bugs. This would save me from having to down my desktop to work on a friends desktop since I do not have separate hardware to run the desktop on. If i could get this to work it would be great!

Thanks

If you don't need to boot the other XP installation and only need to access the disk, the easiest way would be to use an IDE/SATA to USB adapter cable to attach the disk to a running XP VM.

Hi,
I think there is a way to do that, but you will need many empty space on your harddrive!
1. Make a full copy of the XP harddrive with a linux-live-system and the tool "dd". (like sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=xp.image)
2. Create a new Linux-VM with two virtualharddrives.
3. Install a linux-system, for example ubuntu on the first HDD
4. Copy the dd image to the linux guest (scp xp.image user@guest_ip:/)
5. Open a Shell and do "sudo fdisk -l". One HDD is empty! (for example /dev/sdb)
6. Now you can copy the image back (sudo dd if=xp.image of=/dev/sdb)
7. Create a Windows VM and use the second vdi file

Tell me when it works