XP installation on real machine migrate to Guest on Vista?

[MrPete56]

Is there a way to migrate an existing XP Pro installation on a hard drive to become a guest?

I had my old XP computer die and have replaced it with a new 64 bit Vista machine. Being somewhat lazy, I would like to create a virtual XP installation on my new Vista machine from my old boot drive. If I can migrate the installation I won't have to reinstall all the programs that won't run on a Vista machine anyway. There are hard drive utilities that will take an existing operating system and all the programs and move them over to a new, usually bigger, hard drive. I was wondering if there is something similar for VMware workstation. I have Version 6.0.4 build 93057. I don't have any trouble digging into the documentation to impliment this procedure, but I like to know if what I want to do is possible before I start looking. Looking for something that isn't there can take a very long time.

Thanks in advance

[RDPetruska]

Yes, it is possible. You may be able to use the (free) VMware Converter to do just that... however, you need to be able to boot the drive and install the Converter there. You may also be able to use a drive imaging utility to image the old disk; then create a new virtual machine, boot it with the imaging utility's rescue/restore boot disk, and restore the image into the virtual hard drive. Then, before starting that VM again, run VMware Converter against the new virtual machine and select "reconfigure" task to inject the appropriate drivers into the VM.