I have finally ditched windows xp and shifted all my life onto Ubuntu. I had two main reasons for this (and plenty of other minor reasons):

1. I wanted to learn how to use Linux
2. I didn’t want to shell out money for the eye candy update that is windows 7

Because I couldn’t quite let go, I moved my old windows xp install into VirtualBox, its weird seeing it running in a VM under Linux! The whole process was easy, although frustrating (mainly looking at progress dialogs).

I had intended to “blog” how I did it in minute detail, but it was so easy I will just list the steps:

1. Backed up the xp partition (used Acronis, but there are free utilities for this)
2. Restored the backup into the VM (using the Acronis boot-able restore iso image)
3. Fixed the dreaded “a disk read error occurred” by a combination of running chkdsk, fixmbr and fixboot (through the ultimate boot disk – which I thoroughly recommend). For some reason chkdsk on the xp disk didn’t work, the one on the ultimate boot disk seemed to be a later version. If this doesn’t work then try the other utilities on the UBD (forget the names now, but can recall if asked, so if your stuck ask me) to change the MBR.
4. After (3) the boot hung at mup.sys (red herring), ran the windows xp disk and repaired the system
5. Spent hours installing service packs (4) cleans it back to pre-service pack 2
6. Finally re-validated it as a “genuine” MS product

Now I can get on with some coding, darn, only 11 months left this year…