Hard Drive Failure and Replacement?

[BCScott]

I got an error message yesterday when I started up my 7 yr old XP Home desktop. It said my hard drive (pata 40gb) is off spec , do a backup asap, and replace the hard drive asap. I've ordered one (80gb pata) and have a couple of questions. There aren't any computer shops around, so it looks like I'll be doing the replacement myself.
I have an extra bay in my case and the ribbon cable on my current drive has an extra plug in. When I install the new drive, I'd like to make it the primary boot drive. Idealy, I'd like to copy the os and info from my current 40gb drive to the new 80gb drive.
How do I get started? Do I start with the old drive as master and new one as slave, transfer the data, then go back in and change the new one to master? Do I install the os fron the old hd, or from disk? If I want to keep my email history, how do I transfer that? Is something like Norton Ghost the easy way to do this?
Thanks