Starting from scratch - best vm option?

Hi guys,

I have never attempted any form of virtualisation - due to having hardware I though too low end to cope with it.

My main PC (an AMD64bit one of the first quad cores ever) is teetering on the brink of oblivion, and having lots of issues with heating and the like. Sometimes it needs multiple reboots before it comes up at all. It's dual boot between 12.04 and WinXP(32bit) at the moment.

I'm thinking of buying a whole new pc and installing a 64 bit version of ubuntu as the os, and trying to run some virtualisation system to link into the old hdd from the current machine installed into the new box as a second drive. My goal is to not loose all the stuff in the existing XP install, or have to start over with a fresh xp install. About 80% of what I do can now all be done directly in ubuntu, but there is that troublesome last 20% I can't afford to loose access to.

Is this plan even possible to implement? If so, what is the best way to go about it in terms both of virtualisation software, and hardware specifications for the new pc?

Thanks for any advice.

Regards,

Pcal