Mike got tired of having to reboot to get to his xp installation. Poor Mike lets improve your productivity and let you boot your windows partition within your Linux setup.

This solution comes to us from life hacker:

Calling All Dual-booters: You can turn your physical Windows partition into a virtual machine that can be run from Linux. Tech site oopsilon runs through the process which requires Windows XP, Linux partitions and VMware Player. The process is not beginner-friendly, as it requires a decent amount of terminal work. Although the tutorial is written for Gentoo, it should be applicable to any Linux distro. Be sure to backup both operating systems before trying this tutorial as it requires modifying your master boot record (MBR) which can be a bear to restore if anything goes wrong. Looking for a similar (and simpler) tutorial for Windows and Mac?

We’ve got you covered.

Full instructions from oopsilon: Running a Windows Partition in VMware