Can I run an existing XP installation from the (good) hard drive of a broken PC?

[DrHow]

My XP machine has failed.  (A timely death I suppose.  I am now running on a new machine which came with Windows 8.)  The old XP hard drive is OK.  I'd like to be able to run some of the old apps which are installed in the XP environment - partly to facilitate transferring some things over to Windows 8.1.  Though I have no prior experience with virtual machines, I was expecting that I could install the old drive with XP on it in the new machine and be able to run that XP image in a virtual machine.  However, all the walk-throughs I have found for virtualizing one's old XP installation seem to assume that the XP machine is still running.  So I am no longer convinced that it is possible to do what I want, but I do get the impression that VMware Player offers the best chance of success.

If it is still possible, I am hoping that some kind folks will introduce me to the relevant terminology and point me to the relevant documentation.  If I am overlooking some easy viable alternative, please clue me in.

The old CPU was an AMD Athlon.  The GPU was a Radeon variant.  The old hard drive is a SATA drive (which I mention because XP did not come with SATA drivers and I had to clone it onto the SATA drive after installing them).  The new machine is based on an AMD A10-5700 APU.

There is a possible complication in that there is also an Ubuntu system installed on the old hard drive in some separate logical partitions.  I set it up for dual boot when I installed Ubuntu.  Thus the primary partition has a non-Microsoft boot loader.  It defaults to loading XP.  If this is a problem, it occurs to me that it might be possible to fix it by booting up Ubuntu and removing the special boot loader.  It is the older loader that was used by the Ubuntu installer, the name of which escapes me at the moment.  Unfortunately, the Ubuntu installed on the hard drive stopped working the last time I let it upgrade itself.  That was a couple years ago, and I just stopped fooling with Ubuntu rather than fix it.  Thus I would have to run Ubuntu from the DVD drive (or reinstall it).  (Yes, I have already disabled Secure Boot and Ubuntu does boot from DVD.)

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

[DrHow]

I am not sure why my question never got an answer.  However, I eventually figured out that it would be very difficult if possible at all.  Furthermore, I finally realized that I did not really need it.  What sufficed was to create a new installation of XP, which I did in VMware.  Then I could copy in (from the old XP drive) the raw data for the programs whose data I was concerned about (e.g., Outlook Express).  Then I could use each such program to export its  data in a form that could be used on another computer.

[SimonManning]

It's a shame that you never had this answered.  I also have a dead XP machine with a good disk. I plan on getting a Win8.1 machine tomorrow and was hoping to run the old XP as a guest within a few hours rather than spend time migrating.

[WoodyZ]

There are a number of ways to P2V and existing OS on a HDD.  One way is to use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.