Add a new drive while the old one is still in
The XP files and settings wizard actually handles the fact that there may not be anything on the older machine. Cant remember if it writes a floppy or what, but it is designed to work. Some people find it a little tricky to get going.
While you would be wise to back up data on an old drive to another machine, it would be very slow via a network cable. I always simply take the old drive out, and put it in another PC temporarily replacing a CD on the second channel (this means you dont even have to change the old drive to slave with a jumper).
When you boot, the old drive appears as another drive letter on the new PC. Copying stuff from the old to a backup is just drag and drop then, giving you a fall-back backup.
Then put a old drive back in the old PC, along with a brand new drive replacing a CD as above. You can then clone the old drive to the new using software like Partition Magic. The new drive then simply replaces the old, with everything just as before.
There are good reasons, however, to do something else if you can.
Put the new drive in the old PC and install the operating system from scratch. This gives you a clean new OS with various problems (like drive exceeding 137Gb) and so forth sorted out. Or not.
Finally, put the old drive in as a secondary master as before and copy the old data areas to the new drive.
Sometimes all this takes less than a few hours, but mostly some problems crop up (like needing a new bios to recognise very large drives etc, etc) so be prepared for trouble. The beauty of the approach really is that you NEVER at any time write anything on your old drive, and can always fall back to it.
If you havn't got Partition Magic, google for a free version, there are several. Look for 'drive cloning'
best of luck
