TSGL: Moving to a new HD?

[Gene Brown]

I have an aging PC which still serves me well, and I'd like to
replace the primary HD with a larger capacity one.  A few years ago
I added a second physical HD (now acting as D: drive) which is
larger, but I'd like to keep it as secondary and get the added
capacity on my C: drive.  (Oh, and I'd like to do this as quickly
and easily as possible. Hah!)

My C: drive is 80GB with 10GB free, and D: is 180GB with 100GB free.
What I'm thinking about doing is using a disk imaging program (like
Ghost or Acronis) to put everything from current C: onto free space
on D: (in a new partition?), replace C: with my capacious new (and
faster?) HD, boot from a CD, then restore everything back to the new
HD.

I don't know squat about disk imaging, so I'm wondering if this will
work.  The things I want to avoid are reinstalling new programs and
helping them find where the associated data files are, and doing a
fresh install of WinXP.  I have the original CD for WinXP, but it
predates SP2 and would take a long time to get up to date. (Yeah, I
know restoring the image would also restore all the garbage I have
by now in my registry and all kinds of other goofiness, but I think
I've kept things pretty clean.)

So, does this make any sense?  Is it possible (and easy) to do it
this way, or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?