Migrating full, multi-drive Windows XP machine to VM

I have really old machine with 2 PATA drives (320 gb total) it's about 12 years old hardware. It's not used that often nowadays but Windows XP OS residing here has relatively big value and loosing it would be serious problem. Especially it's the only Windows around.

I've noticed that linux on this machine installed as secondary OS is reporting some HDD issues during boot so I think it's the last chance to rescue it as this machine is starting to be ticking time bomb.

I need to migrate physical machine to VM preserving as much functionality as possible (reinstalling Windows by "repair" is unacceptable) in order to boot it up on Linux host. I don't really care if it's going to be VirtualBox or VMWare Player as long as it's free solution and works for Linux VM host. Primary conce is that no matter what OS on original machine cannot get damaged during process and original machine has to remain bootable. So messing with registry on original machine sounds like pretty bad idea to me.

I'd prefer VBox but after some research I'm afraid migration procedure required by it can be destuctive for original host. So what are availalble alteatives?

Recent Questions...