2 drives both with windows xp?

[PunkRawk911]

Alright, I'm rebuilding the family computer for my parents, and I will be using a different hard drive than is what in the computer right now. My question is, is it possible that I can just install windows xp on the new harddrive, and then plug in the old harddrive and copy files directly to the new computer so I don't have to go through the trouble of burning tons of cd's with backups on them? I was thinking it should work, but I don't know how windows would react to having two harddrives with windows on them.

[KILLorBE]

That should work fine, some HDD manuf. (Like Maxtor) have an utility (for Maxtor it's called either MaxBlast or PowerMax) that will copy the entire drive, that might be alot easier.

[PunkRawk911]

The thing is, I don't want to copy the entire drive. Basically what I want to do is just copy over files like internet explorer favorites and e-mails, and documents without having to burn the cd's. I can't really copy the entire drive because the computer the drive is coming out of has a via chipset, and the new computer will have an nvidia chipset and different hardware and stuff, so it would be a driver nightmare.

[KILLorBE]

Then just install XP on the new drive, but remember to either physically remove the old drive or make the old drive 'slave', otherwise it'll write all the info needed to boot on the old drive.