I did as instructed in the article "Prepare to Use a Physical Disk or Unused Partition". I also ran diskpart clean on the physical disk as suggested. The problem still exists. It works fine unless I shut my PC down. When the PC is restarted and I try to start the XP in VMware I get the Physical Disk in use error. If I go into Disk Management in Windows 7 and right click the disk and take it offline and then right click it when it shows offline and put it back Online it will start correctly. I can live with this unless someone has a solution.
Can I partition this same physical disk and load Windows 8 on the other partition.
FYI, I loaded XP on the same drive as Windows 7 while I was working on the physical drive and it is working correctly but I want XP on the separate drive for more storage.
I probably should mention my hard drive setup. I have 3 drives in this PC. I have a SATA drive that I store all the backups for my programs, movies and music on (easy to remove and use with an adapter to USB when needed). I have 2 Ide drives both are set up as cable select. The primary Ide drive is my Windows 7 drive. The secondary drive is what I am trying to get XP and Windows 8 on.to gain space on my W7 drive.