You can also check some of the drive manufacturers
support pages. I know Western Digital
<
www.wdc.com support downloads >has a little routine
(free) called Data Lifeguard Tools (or something like that)
which does exactly what Thomas was describing. I'm fairly
certian that Seagate and others have something similar.
After all, when you buy one of their drives, they want your
conversion to go as smoothly as possible. The Seagate
version is called "Disc Wizard" under support software at
the Seagate site.
I also have the impression that you haven't opened up a lot
of computers (if you have, ignore the following). You might
find that your old hard drive is a master on channel IDE #1
with an optical drive as the slave. If so, you can simply hook
your replacement hard drive up to IDE #2 as a master for
the system transfer. Of course you would need another
ribbon cable to do this. This is also assuming that you are
using IDE or PATA drives and not a SATA drive.
This is also assuming you still have a bootable system.
Mark H