Convert old harddrive to VHD

I recently upgraded to Win7 on my laptop, but I still needed my old environment (WinXP).

So I installed Win7 on a fresh new disk that was bigger and better than my old. That way I always could swap disk if I needed my old environment. But I also was hoping for a solution where I could run my old system inside Virtual PC, and now it is.

I used the tool Disk2vhd from Microsoft Sysinternals.

For WinXP remember to set “Fix up HAL for Virtual pc”.

When its finished, you need to create a new Virtual PC and used the newly created vhd file as its harddrive. You also will need to activate windows once more when you startup. At least I had to.