Can I mount a Windows hard drive to run in Virtualbox?

So my sister's girlfriend had a Dell laptop that had it's motherboard nuked from a power surge. She got a new computer, but wants data that can only be exported from running programs (i.e. a library that integrated into a cabinet file). I am running 10.7.2 and have used Virtualbox to test programs in a virtual XP machine running within OSX. I wanted to know if it was possible to mount the hard drive from the dead computer and run a virtual machine using said drive.
Basically, I want to set up a virtual machine within OSX that would use the Dell hard drive and mimic her old Dell. The purpose is to export libraries by running programs within the installation. Can anybody help with this? Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

madtube wrote:
Basically, I want to set up a virtual machine within OSX that would use the Dell hard drive and mimic her old Dell. The purpose is to export libraries by running programs within the installation. Can anybody help with this? Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
This might work, but I suspect that you will have many more problems due to hardware drivers on the Dell HD. The OS installed there will be looking for specific hardware, and almost guaranteed the Virtual Box emulated hardware won't be the same, and most likely it will be different enough to prevent the Dell Windows installation from booting. Now, If you can use the Parallels Transporter, or the VMWare equivalent, I believe that they take care of stripping the hardware specific drivers when they create a virtual machine, but I don't know if Virtual Box has such a tool.

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