I have two OS's installed on different drives in my PC. One linux (Centos 5.4) and one windows 7. Its getting tiresome to constantly have to stop and restart the PC when I want to use either OS.

I would very much like to use Windows 7 as my host OS and access my linux OS from within Windows. However, im having trouble deciphering exactly how to do this (many of the articles seem confusing and a bit overkill)

From what i have seen its possible to use VMWare converter to convert the physical linux image to a virtual image so that I can use it in windows.

As im having problems understanding how this is done, I would really appreciate a step by step guide (for a newbie), or any simple tutorials that you can point me at.

Some questions beforehand:

1) My linux image is around 80gb, do i need to take this into consideration? The linux drive is around 180gb in total. All my other drives are NTFS non writeable in linux (as I use them in windows and ntfs is dodgy in linux), so probably not possible to move the image over to my ntfs drives

2) Can I just zip the linux files up somehow and transfer it to windows to create the p2v?

3) Is it possible to do the P2V conversion while I am logged into windows. I can see the actual linux drive loaded in disk manager, but windows doesnt read linux file systems so im confused as to how to access the linux drive if this is possible.

4) Or will i need to do the whole p2v conversion inside linux?

Cheers, any help is much appreciated

Ke (a confused p2v newbie)