CJ,
Glad it's working out for you - you can make a block-level copy of a hard disk with the software provided by the disk imaging application provider - e.g. Ghost or similar. You boot off a CD or floppy (I assume that you can get the SATA disk visible with the appropriate BIOS settings plus drivers), not the OS on the hard disk, so the fact that winXP can't see the disk shouldn't matter.
SD