If you are user of VMWare workstation, you may be interested of way how to migrate your existing physical machine into the virtual one. You may either buy VMWare P2V assistant starter edition or you may use the workflow for not less than trying that;) I made successful experimental migration with following configuration: OS: Windows XP professional SP1, VMware 4.0, ‘Image maker’: PowerQuest DriveImage 7.0. Note that later VMWares doesn’t allow to run PowerQuest recovery utility ! (but waste your time and try it to prove it)
1. Make your HDD image by running Drive Image on your physical machine
2. Put the image on some acessible network or external HDD which can be seen by PQ Recovery utility
3. Configure you VMWare virtual machine for target OS with disk and nework specs.
4. Boot inside VMWare PQ Recovery utility and find your drive image
5. Run restore (I do not remember the right toggles checked in…I made it in October..leaving defaults should work)
Sample picture from migration :is here