VMWare running native XP on SATA disk

There have been a few attempts at documenting the process of running a windows install directly from the hard disk via VMWare running on a GNU/Linux host. The most publicized attempt was made “digg famous” here: Running a Windows Partition in VWware — they all fall flat in various ways. The previous example could only run on systems with IDE, and not SATA drives, which are becoming ubiquitous, and on top of that it was unnecessarily complicated.

This is part One, part Two is here:

VMWare running native XP on SATA disk, part 2.

Resources:
http://vmware.com/download/server/drivers_tools.html

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Running_a_Windows_Partition_in_VMware

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-246371-start-25.html?sid=ae86f6d7c87732ca4661ca0cf2731d35

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3642297

http://sanbarrow.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=930&start=0&sid=2bb0f1e76a0e57cf7d6a0547b3deaf20