I have a Windows XP laptop that uses GuardianEdge's Encryption Plus to fully encrypt the drive from bootup. What I would like to do is install a much larger (unencrypted) hard drive with Windows 7 on it and turn this fully encrypted drive into a Virtual Machine that can be ran in either Virtualbox or VMWare on the Windows 7 host.

I've read many howto's that talk about using an imaging tool like Acronis True Image to image the drive then passing that through VMWare's VCenter Converter to turn it into a format that VMWare can understand. Unfortunately this seems to all far apart when you are dealing with a fully encrypted drive because Acronis cannot recognize the file system and attempts to do a sector-by-sector copy of the entire hard drive. This is extremely wasteful since the drive is 120GB but the file system is only using 10GB of that. Even if I were OK with going with an inefficient 120GB sector-by-sector copy, I'm not sure that this would even work under VMWare or Virtualbox.

Unfortunately, the Guardian Edge boot-time login comes up only after the hard drive has been selected as the boot device; preventing me from being able to decrypt the drive prior to booting an Acronis True Image CD so that it can recognize the underlying file system.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to want to do this but I am having a heck of a time finding solutions to this problem. All suggested/answers welcomed.

Thanks