Is the following possible with Acronis True Image Home

Well, perhaps I should clarify a bit. Before replacing old drive, I would like to create an image with Acronis of probably just the C: (ntfs partition), and then after installing a new drive, and newer OS's (windows 7 & ubuntu dual booting), I would like to use the image of windows xp created with acronis, and either have it as another bootable partition on the new hard drive, or somehow convert it to a virtual machine that would run under windows 7 or ubuntu as a guest os

You should be able to do that. My preference would be to setup a multi-boot system (you could use GRUB2 from Ubuntu, if you wanted) and to have XP on a Primary partition on the booting drive.

If you restore XP into a VM (or convert it), you may need to change drivers or make other adjustments. Also, if the XP is an OEM version, don't expect it to activate in the VM.

When creating a setup like this, it's often helpful to make an Entire Disk Image backup before adding an OS. This way you can easily restore and start over if it goes wrong.

Thank you for responding. I've done a little more research and I'll slowly be working through this migration / upgrade. I'll attempt to take some notes and post a summary of results, but it will be awhile as I work through this. Luckily I'm not in panic mode with a crashed disk.
Thank you for reminding me of making backups before adding OS to a working set-up. What a great feature to be able to roll back to a fully working system, if I've somehow cratered the installation.
I've read that Windows 7 will recognize XP as an "older version of windows" and permit it to boot. But am not sure if it is only when you add windows 7 to a working xp setup, or if it would work adding xp after a working windows 7 setup. For my new disk, I'm thinking of starting with windows 7, getting the laptop working correctly, working out partition sizes, then adding windows xp, and finally ubuntu. It would be nice to start with Ubuntu, because I believe that I would more control of partition sizes, etc, but am not sure how windows 7 will react to being added to a working Ubuntu set-up. So, I need to do more research on which way is best to proceed for my particular set-up. Specifically more research in multi-boot environments, and what are the risks/benefits to proceeding in a particular order of installation of the individual OS's
Also thanks for the heads up on restoring to a VM or converting it. Sounds like the primary partition is the better way to go.