I'm a Linux user but I keep a compressed Windows XP ISO with me on a pen drive for the case I absolutely need Windows to do something. This works in VirtualBox most of the time.

But now I want to play some games, so I would like to run the Windows image natively. My computer don't have CD drive so cannot just burn the ISO and make an install normally.

What I trying to do is moving the installed Windows image to a physical NTFS partition on my HDD and set up GRUB to let me dual boot it.

I found many tutorials that deal with making VDI to physical drive. But they assume I want to overwrite my entire drive. Moving the raw disk image with dd to the partition resulted in a corrupt partition.

I also tried the VMDK trick to use that empty partition and install the Windows on it. Although the text mode phase of the installation finishes without problems, the VM won't work, either crashes and keeps rebooting or just immediately or freezes (depending on how I created the VMDK, with -rawdisk /dev/sda3 or -rawdisk /dev/sda -partition 3).