[PLUG] Trying to Convert a Windows XP disk to VirtualBox

[Mark Phillips]

I have a dual boot machine with two physical drives - Windows XP Pro and
Debian testing. I need to replace the Windows drive with another drive to
add more space to the Debian drive. Instead of just chucking the Windows
drive drive (only 40GB and the machine only has space for two hard drives),
I thought I would virtualize it and run it in virtualbox on the Debian
machine. I am having no success in (1) finding a lot of information on how
to do this and (2) actually accomplishing the task.

I have tried using vmware vcenter converter 4.0.1. I have the client running
on one Linux machine (hammerhead), the Windows source on another (basenji),
and the destination folder is a windows share on a third machine (goofy).
After struggling to get it to run, it dies within a minute with an error:

FAILED: Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume(s). Error code:
2147754758 (0x80042306).

It is able to find the client and source folder with no issues. Googling the
error code and message did not give me any good results. I had one warning
on the config setup screen - "Unable to locate the required Sysprep files.
Please upload them under /var/vmware-vcenter-converter-standalone/sysprep/xp
on the Converter server machine." I found the .cab on the Microsoft site and
put it in the required location, but I still get that warning.

My questions -

1. Anyone know how to get VMware converter to work? My assumption, after
some reading, is that virtualbox will be able to import the output from
vmware converter.

2. Other suggestions for recipes to virtualize a physical Windows XP drive?

Thanks!

Mark

P.S. The other reason I want to make this work, is that I have a new laptop
with Windows 7. I planto install Debian and virtualize the Windows 7
partition and get rid of the dual boot. This excercise with the Windows XP
drive is my test bed to see how to make it work. I am not sure if there are
any extra gotchas to virtualizing Windows 7.