Windows XP Virtualization

So I have this partition with Windows XP installed on it, which I mainly use to sync and backup my iPhone (yeah yeah... closed, proprietary... but it's still a pretty gadget!), and since it's been going BSOD on me right on boot-up (i.e. I can't even log in!), I've decided that it might be a good idea to try and run it in a more controlled environment.

In the Ubuntu forums, I found this thread a while back, and decided to try it. Now, I have a SATA II drive, and the tutorial said the it might not work woth SATA drives, but I thought what the heck... it's not working anyhow, worst case scenario - it won't work!

The tutorial is for VirtualBox version 1.6, which is pretty old - the current version at the date of writing is 2.1.2, so I downloaded that version. And what do you know! it has support for SATA :)

Most of it went pretty well, except for the part where I had to change the drivers for the disk controller... since I couldn't boot into Windows, so I just skipped that part, and hoped for the best.

Almost everything works fine:

• It boots
• I can log in
• Sound
• Internet access
• VirtualBox extensions work (I'm not going to boot directly into it...)
• USB*
  

But it's very slow... I suspect it's the hard disk controller drivers, but I still have to experiment with that.

Also, for some reason, Windows seems to think it has USB 1 ports only! when in fact, I don't have any USB 1 ports on my system... only USB2. I'll have to check up on that. Maybe VirtualBox doesn't support it, or I'm doing something wrong.

But for now, I have a working Windows XP installation running in a virtual machine, and I still cannot sync/backup my iPhone (I hope nothing bad happens to my phone while I figure things out)

[edit: forgot the links to VirtualBox]