New harddrive and windows XP backup feature

My current HD keeps giving me a SMART error on startup and I'm pretty sure it's gonna die soon. I am planning on getting a new HD tomorrow, but wasn't sure how to go about using the XP backup feature. 1st of all do I have to format and load XP on the new drive 1st before copying or can I just slap the new HD in and start the process? The new HD will be used as the slave drive until all files are copied then I'll toss the old drive. Will I even be able to load XP onto a new HD since I've already loaded and activated it already? Thanks.

The same thing happened to me. I went down and got a program called Copy Commander and it copied everything to the new HD. It walks you through on how to do it and it is easy.

Don't know about the reactivation part, but you could just download Maxtor's Maxblast utility to copy one drive to another.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/dow.../maxblast3.htm

Like Scott pointed out, some hard drive manufacturers have utilities to copy the contents of your old hard drive to your new one. They're often included on a floppy disk with retail drives, and most companies like Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate post the utility on their web site so you can use them for OEM drives, too.

If you use one of these utilities to clone your old hard drive, you shouldn't need to reactivate your OS.