I've wondered about the best method of transferring stuff from the old drive. You could do Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner, but if there are problems with the structure of the old drive, do those then migrate to the new one? My hard drive has been flakey (white macbook) for awhile - I've been advised to archive & install - this fixes the problem for a while, then a recurrence of the same issues - frequent hangs, console messages, weird errors.
I'm wondering if it's better to start from scratch - re-install the OS that came with the system, let the updates run, re-install applications, and then copy over Home. I imagine you'd lose your settings, web preferences, etc. but those aren't a huge deal to me.
Dave