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VMWare used to (and might still, I don't know) have an option where you could use a real system image on a hard drive as a VMWare image, so that you could both run it under VMWare and reboot into it natively. It was a pain in the ass to set up, but was really snazzy for when VMWare was useful, but you wanted to play games, too.

I tried that before and Windows was really unhappy about all the hardware changing from its point of view. From what I remember, booting the real partition under VMWare worked but when I tried to boot it properly, it promptly died. Gave up after that and haven't tried it since.