This is a really good walk through of how to convert your physical machine into a VMware virtual machine using the VMware Converter Starter package.  Thanks to HowToForge for helping us out with this.

This article shows how you can convert a physical Windows system (XP, 2003, 2000, NT4 SP4+) into a VMware virtual machine with the free VMware Converter Starter. The resulting virtual machine can be run in the free VMware Player and VMware Server, and also in VMware Workstation and other VMware products. VMware Converter comes in handy if you want to switch to a Linux desktop, but feel the need to run your old Windows desktop from time to time. By converting your Windows desktop into a virtual machine, you can run it under VMware Server/Player, etc. on your Linux desktop.

In this article I will convert a Windows XP desktop into a virtual machine. Afterwards I will start the virtual machine in VMware Server.

(You can find guides for installing VMware Server on Debian Sarge and Ubuntu Dapper Drake here:

• Debian Sarge: http://www.howtoforge.com/debian_sarge_vmware_server_howto
• Ubuntu Dapper Drake: http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_vmware_server

Read the entire article and follow the steps by going here.