I was just stopping by diig.com as I normally do about once a day and low and behold, the second to the top is a vmware diig.

Imran Nazar was looking for a way to solve his particular problem (how to convert a dual boot system to a virtualized one), and when he didn’t find much info on it on the web, he decided to write up a tutorial himself. Good stuff.

“I have my system partitioned into two: one part of the hard drive hosts a Windows XP partition, and the other runs Gentoo Linux. About a month ago, I was just about tired of having to reboot to switch between the two, so I decided to set up a VM for Windows.

There was, however, a snag to this: I wanted to use the existing Windows installation, because I’d tuned it up and installed the software I always use. I expressly didn’t want a virtual disk image duplicating my Windows drive, since I didn’t have the space for that. So, that was the task: running the Windows partition in a VM.

I hunted around the ‘Net, and found surprisingly little information on this: the procedure I finally threw together was sourced from many disparate places. So, in one place, I’ve put together the steps you’ll need to take in order to get a Windows partition running inside a VM.”

Worth a read and a digg. Thanks Imran.