My laptop came with Windows XP installed on a partition. It happens to be the only Windows install I have, and I do need it for school from time to time. I managed to resize the big ol' NTFS partition and install linux on the disk, so I really only boot WinXP about twice a month.

My question is, is it possible to load that WindowsXP environment within a virtual machine like VMWare or Xen or something similar without damaging it, or is the only way to use WinXP installed on a seperate partition booting it proper?

It would definitely make me much happier if I could just fire it up within my linux desktop vs a reboot, spend 10 minutes doing something trivial, and rebooting again.

Is what I'm proposing possible, or am I just talking nonsense?

You could do that with VMware, but not Xen. Xen doesn't yet support NTFS, but they're working on it. I can't tell you what you would have to do to get it working, other than install VMware.

Not try it myself but "kexec" is a Linux program to allow a user to hot-boot Windows on exit of Linux.

The VMware also have two versions. The one based on Linux should allow you to fire up Windows from a Linux. I believe you have to install Windows again to get this functionality because the second or above system in a VMware do not have a full installation as things like the boot loader is not needed and hence not fully installed.

I'm fairly familiar with VMWare, I'll see if I can't get it working... I was mainly curious if I could use it to boot another partition within linux or if it ran on a strictly-image type of setup. I'll give it a shot and post back.