For windows XP or greater it is very easy.
Disk2VHD is a free microsoft utility that runs under windows and created a VHD on the same computer, that is a model of the machine. This can be attached to a virtual machine in Virtual PC and started. All that is required is sufficient disk space on the machine to create this VHD. On the first machine I tried this on it took a few hours to build.
Download Disk2VHD here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
For Windows 2000 and older this approach will not work.
This did not work either.
Final course, I am going to pull the HD out of the laptop running windows 2000, plug it into a Windows 7 machine, and use Disk2VDH to clone it from there.
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Did this again with a 35 GB Windows 7 machine when we were retiring the hardware due to an office move.
This time the image was saved on an External HD Drive connected via a USB 2.0 connection.
This took 45 mins for a 35GB system.
To test, I tried the Windows 7 version of Virtual PC, with the extra install for a machine with non-hardware virtualisation support.
This took a while to setup and there were several steps:
1) Downloaded and installed Windows XP mode
2) Then downloaded the update installer for Virtual PC
This required a restarted after installation
3) Install the update for the hardware, if the PC does not support hardware virtualisation.
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