Naughty question: copy Windows XP under Fedora?

[Gary Stainburn]

On Monday 20 January 2014 10:29:07 Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I always keep a copy of Windows XP on my computers.
> I very rarely use them, but find that they are occasionally useful.
> In any case, with the upcoming death of XP
> I'm thinking of keeping a backup copy of my Windows partition
> on a USB stick or external hard disk.
>
> I looked briefly for a method for this under Windows,
> but all the solutions I found seemed either absurdly complicated
> or else were linked to expensive programs which I certainly don't want.
>
> It struck me that there is probably a simpler way of doing this under
> Linux, and I was wondering if someone not of a fanatical bent might help
> me.

Firstly, why bother changing anything? It is only the support that is ceasing, 
XP will continue to function. I

 have VirtualBox installed on my Fedora 19 system mainly so that I can run a 
WinXP VM for those things that I need to use Windows for. I wish I'd done 
that ages ago as it's so much better than dual booting.

I don't know if there is a tool to convert a physical XP machine to a VM as I 
did as the installation notes suggested and created a clean XP install - 
resulting in a XP VM that actually runs quicker than the old native physical 
mode XP setup.  There are tools out there to do that for VMWARE. Is there 
still a free VMWARE package available?

My suggestion is though, if you don't need to change and don't want to change, 
then don't change

Gary