As long as the hard drive you put the files on is not the boot drive (the one with XP on it), you'll be ok. You probably should unplug that drive while you reinstall, just to be safe.

If you want to save time, and assuming your system was shipped after July 14, 2004, you have PC Restore on the hard drive. It will reset the drive to exactly the way Dell shipped it. All personal files will be lost after PC Restore so you still need to back them up on the other drive. Press Ctrl-F11 before XP starts to load to start PC Restore.

After PC Restore, you'll have to install all Microsoft updates for XP, IE, Office, etc, etc, but you'd have to do that after a reformat/reinstall too. Advantage is that PC Restore will reinstall all hardware drivers and software that Dell provided, but a reformat/reinstall doesn't do that automatically. And PC Restore will be done in only ~10 minutes.

PC Restore

Ron

So if I move everything to the second hard drive and unplug it during the reinstall, will the computer still recognize the hard drive when I plug it back in?

My system doesn't have PC Restore so that's not an option.

I'm assuming this is not a RAID setup, just 2 separate drives. So yes the drive should be recognized when you reconnect it (with power off!) as long as the SATA (or PATA) controller for that drive is enabled in BIOS setup, and assuming the drive doesn't need any additional drivers.

Ron