VM setup from dual boot

[Sandy Harris]

I've got a machine that happily dual boots. Grub & most of Linux
on sda, a solid state disk. Swap, XP and a few other things on
sdb, a hard drive.

I sometimes need XP, because my work involves editing Word
files and OO does not handle all of them right. In particular, it
has trouble with docx files and complex multi-column formats.

Is there an easy way to get from where I am -- dual boot with
a full XP install on sdb1 -- to a usable VM system? All the
instructions I find assume you build the VM first, then put
an OS on it.

Ubuntu 10.10 on a fairly powerful machine. 3 GHz dual
core, hyperthreaded so Linux things there are four, 8 gigs
RAM, 19xx by 10xx graphics. My XP apps do not need
much of that, maybe 512 megs, one core, 1024*768.