Booting an existing physical Windows installation as a virtual machine

This is a very common question: "I have an existing Windows installation on one partition, and I would like to boot it as a virtual machine from VMware Server or VMware Player running on Linux". It should be simple, right? After all, we are working with computers here!

This is possible, but not always. It depends on the hardware, disk driver, the version of Windows, phase of the moon etc. In effect, you are taking a Windows installation and booting it on entirely different hardware. If your Windows version is an OEM license (came bundled with the hardware), DO NOT TRY this. OEM version of Windows cannot be moved to a different hardware.

Time for a warning: You may end up with a Windows installation that does not boot in virtual nor physical. There. You have been warned. We recommend that you use VMware Converter instead and create a separate virtual copy of Windows.

The basic steps are:
1. Boot your Windows as a physical installation
2. Create a new hardware profile to be used when booting as virtual. Name it so you know which it is, "VirtualXP" or so.
    This prevents Windows messing up your existing device setup in Windows when it boots on virtual hardware.
3. Shutdown windows
4. Create a VM and configure the Windows physical partition as an IDE hard drive to it. If your Windows installation used a SCSI drive, use SCSI instead.
5. Try booting the guest. Choose "VirtualXP" as the hardware profile. If it boots successfully, install VMware Tools before accepting any of the devices Windows has detected.
6. Reboot after the Tools installation, and now accept the detected devices.
7. Windows may ask for activation. This is designed into Windows - hardware changes, it wants to activate. You may have to activate each time you switch between virtual and physical. Using a volume or student license version of Windows avoids this.


Check also this useful guide for use with VMware Player.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/Howto_run_Windows_with_VMware_Player_in_Linux_for_free