Vista - migrating xp installation to virtual pc on vista using backup and

Hi,
I would like to migrate the whole harddisk image of my old xp laptop to my
new vista laptop and run my xp in vista over a virtual pc. I thought of using
the backup feature of xp to get the backup image of my whole xp harddisk and
later using the asr feature to restore the backup image onto a virtual pc on
my new laptop. Since my xp laptop has limited space left to create the backup
image (the backup is 35GB), i had to resort to a network storage for backup.

Now, I tried the asr restore of the backup on virtual pc 2007 running on
vista on my new laptop. Everything goes fine, but when it asks for the backup
image location, i cannot feed it because its on the network and i cannot
access it.

I tried creating a linked harddisk to the virtual pc and putting my backup
image there for restoration by asr. But linked harddisks seem to be not
allowed in vpc 2007.
Does anybody has any ideas on how to do this ? What is the best way to
migrate my old harddisk on to virtual pc ?

Thanks in advance,
Anoop

I am doing a similar type of thing.

I've already cloned my original 80GB hard drive onto a new 160GB hard drive (80GB partition) and I'm running my same copy of XP just fine. I'm ready to install Vista business on the other 80 GB partition.

I want to keep the dual boot option because I won't be using Vista solely. I'm wondering about options of installing Vista on the 2nd partition and having Virtual PC 2007 reference the 1st partition (XP) instead of installing a new OS. I don't want to have to configure everything again and install new software, etc. If it can simply reference that partition for the source files and just install what it needs onto the Vista partition then that would be ok too, as long as there wasn't any re-installation of software. Basically, what I want to do is similar to remote desktop but to a partition on the same disk and with the extra functionality of Virtual PC.

I haven't found any places that will allow this. Does anyone have any leads/info or anything? Maybe VMWare does this and I haven't seen anything about it yet. Since Virtual PC is free, I would prefer to use that.

Any help is much appreciated.

Edit: I do realize it is best to install them on two separate physical disks. This is a laptop in this scenario and without the use of an external drive, one physical disk is my only option.