advice on hard drive change?

I have a Presario 715 on XP and the hard drive is making noise. I need advice on how to make a clone of the drive before it dies.
Options: 1) buy a usb to usb cable and somehow copy all the c drive to another pc. Will this work and how do I do it, dos xcopy?
2) Buy a zip drive. I have about 9 gig in use on the old drive.
3) Put the new drive in and do a "quick restore" and then copy all the files from the other PC?
4) Is there a way to write multiple cd's to make a backup of the entire c drive? I have NT backup loaded.
5) Buy an external drive and move everything to that first?
Any comments on these ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

buy a new drive install an operating system on it use it as master,set up the old as slave and drag all your files over.

 

I have the new drive. I have to remove the old one to install the new one.

 

A program like Norton Ghost or PowerQuest DriveImage would make an exact clone of the old drive.
You can get Ghost bundled with Norton Systemworks Pro 2003 here for $19 US.