I'm curious as to the possibility of virtualization of an OS off of a physical hard disk. I'm running Slackware 13.1 on one HDD (SATA) and Windows XP SP1 on a completely different physical HDD (PATA). Is it possible to virtualize Windows XP (Like a virtual system with virtual drives) using the physical drive that I have Windows installed on. If this is possible it would be amazingly helpful! I can understand that I, most likely, won't be able to run games through the virtual windows system (despite my hardware) but I just want to ability to access both OS's at once. Thanks for any help.

QEMU or QEMU-KVM can use a whole physical drive. They reference it in their doumentation: http://wiki.qemu.org/download/qemu-d...ost_005fdrives

You have to be careful using this setup since both the host and guest will have access to the same physical drive. If the host tries to write to the drive while the guest is running you could end up with drive corruption.

additional LQ reference: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...gerous-665843/

Many vendors and open source projects can make Physical to Virtual. Commonly called P2V.

You can simply dd any partition and use it as a raw or an .img. As above you may be able to convert it using qemu-img convert.

You can also run real partitions on some VM's. Do not VM the partition you booted from.

Any how-to's?

VMplayer, virtualbox and qemu offer ways to VM a physical drive. Unless you need to remove the physical drive, there no need to p2v it.