Going Virtual
Converting your Physical hard drive operating system over to a virtual one can be very useful for a number of things.
For example: archiving an old computer or system without having to depend on the hardware that it is running on lasting for ever.
Microsoft Disk 2 VHD
This programme can be found under the downloads section or you can find it at this website:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Disk to VHD can be used to make a virtual machine from any system that has an operating system that supports Microsoft Shadow copy - Basically anything from XP onwards.
For XP remember to tick the Fix Hal tick box as otherwise your image will not start. I have made numerous XP images using this and once you have created the image you will need to reactivate XP when Windows starts software so you will need the original license key to do this. I have encountered one Image that would not start this was a really old XP machine originally so to get the image to run I booted the Virtual PC up to an XP install cd and selected repair when the installation options came up on the screen - this took a bit longer but the image works.
Once you have run this programme you will have a single .vhd file that you can load up using Microsoft’s Virtual PC.http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/ for Windows 7 Users
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/virtual-pc-2007.aspx for XP and Vista Users
