How this might or might not work depends on how you partitioned this second drive. The bootloader used by XP will started from the Master Boot Record on the disk so on the second drive you need the MBR to point at the XP bootloader on the correct partition.
I'd personally go for another drive to clone the entire system disk to and keep your backup one for backups.
Also with the PC being so old, the current 200Gb Maxtor will be an IDE/PATA drive not SATA. I bet your external backup drive is SATA. If the system only supports IDE/PATA then your going to be a bit limited on new drives as they are mostly SATA now. But you're probably talking £50-60 for a new drive around 250GB in size.
And to answer the original question, as well as the bootloader etc. the operating system consists of some (hidden) files on the root of the drive, the contents of the Windows folder and some programs will be in the Program Files folder.
As others said, you ought to clone the disk as is. To clone it to another IDE drive you're going to have to risk powering it down. You could instead use something like Clonezilla to write the cloned image to a file on your external USB drive. Then at least you have a copy you can write back to a new drive later.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Fri 7 Dec 12 at 14:49
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