Building a new PC...kinda

You can't transfer programs because they need to be installed.

Once you have removed the data off the old hard drive, you can format it through the disk management feature found in XP. Go to the control panel, administative tools, computer management then disk management. Find the old hard drive, right click on it and select format.

...to set up one of the hard drive's on the new system..Although you can copy all of the data from the old to the new, you'll need a functioning operating system to do that so the new hard drive, assuming it's the master, must have an operating system on it and it needs to have been installed while on the new system..

Likewise, you can't just "move" the old hard drive to the new new system and make it the "Master"..It almost never boots up..During the installation of an operating system, all of the hardware is recognized and drivers and settings are installed. As a result, the old hard drive won't recognize any of the new hardware, it won't have any of the correct drivers, mothboard software, etc..

If you want to transfer a lot of files over to the new hard drive, you can do that by making a slave drive, but everything on the new drive must be installed first.

Hope this helps.

Grif

you can install both drives on your chassis. If you plan to use your old OS, try booting from the old HD. If you have an OS CD, in your motherboard BIOS (accessed by pressing F2 or F8 at the beginning of start up) select your optical drive to boot first, then your new HD. If it displays "No Operating System" open up your optical drive and put the OS disk in. Shut the computer manually, and wait 10 sec. before restart. Restart and the drive close automatically and your OS setup should appear. After all that, you can transfer your files within windows and format the old drive. It is recommend to format both drives to the same format (NTSC or FAT32). Note: you can only format the drive without your running OS.

Hi
First of all read the above posts.
I had a similar case. I had a 40GB samsung HDD from an older computer. In the new computer, I had Hitachi Deskstar 160GB. I set up the Hitachi as the master and instlled the OS (Win XP).Since the new motherboard had the latest nvidia chipset, I couldn't use Win98Se.
Then I set up the old HDD as the slave and copied and pasted my data from Samsung to Hitachi.Setting up of the HDDs as master or Slave requires the changing of jumper pin settings. So refer to the documentation.
Second method- Borrow an external DVD Writer and burn the the data on DVDs