John, not sure what is the best approach and what is possible for you, but have different choices:
A. Vmware has a tool which allows to create a VM from a physical computer. You may need to search for it during these Broadcom-times.
You do that on a different computer, preferably with SSD disks for decent performance. You do NOT use the old disks for the new computer. The Tool lets you decide what you take with it. Pay attention to your selections. You can of course try it out multiple times. The end result is a VM working in the new environment.
However, don't know if this works or not - is XP supported and all that.
B. If you only need the data - you write "software data" don't know what it means - you can always have those disks on another system and read the data. You don't need the computer to boot up. The other system can be a physical computer or probably it is more handy if it's VM-computer.
In this scenario, you use the data wherever and whatever operating system you wish. However, you don't get any software automatically transferred to you. If you have the software media and installation keys, you can always install them again. If you have software that requires XP, creating a new XP computer isn't trivial, because of its patching and SP issues, but you can probably run them in Win7. Win10 and later, might not work for XP era software (not all of them anyway).
You can always read the disks somewhere else, unless they are encrypted. If Windows turns out to be difficult for that purpose, use Linux - it doesn't care what kind of file permissions you might have given in Windows.
I hope either way works for you.