In a virtual machine setup, sharing files and programs between the host machine and the virtual machine is bit of a bother. You can share folders by networking between the two machines, but the virtual machine itself has to be built from scratch right from installing the operating system to installing software and configuring it the way you like.
Disk2vhd is wonderful utility from Sysinternals that allows you to take your host machine or any physical machine and convert into a virtual machine to be used with virtual machine software like Microsoft Virtual PC, Virtual Box, and VM Workstation.
Disk2vhd requires no installation. Simply run the executable, select the hard drive partitions you want to convert and click on Create. It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside preserving the partitioning information of the disk. This VHD image can then be mounted into a virtual machine and immediately access installed software from it.
Disk2vhd is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003 including x64 systems. Just take note that Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB, so make sure the size of the VHD is lower than that.
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