Sure - moving the drive to another machine will work. But I would try something else.
Do you have a serial or parallel port on the DOS machine? If so, you can install LapLink and use that to transfer the files.

http://www.laplink.com/support/faq/faq2.asp?ID=299

That is what we used to do when the world was still young and innocent.

Or you could get a cheap Ethernet-card, and use something like Acronis True Image. It boots a live Linux kernel of a CD and can then use the Ethernet-card to access and store drive-images located on the hard-drive of your XP machine. The Ethernet card should not cost you many cents, and True Image can be downloaded as an almost fully working trial, so you can easily check if it will work for you.

Coupla questions:

Are you using Dos 6.11 or 7.0 (the one on Win98 boot disks)? Dos 7.0 can handle Fat32 HDs, which is much less of a limitation. If you stick with Dos 6.11 and you put the 80 gig drive in your machine, you're going to have to partition everything to something like 2 gigs max.

Is your retro comp able to recognize the 80gig? If so you're in good shape there. If not, you either need to update the BIOS on your motherboard, or cap the drive at 30gigs if it's got a jumper for that.

I'd recommend backing up your drive if you've worked hard on it for sure. Burning the whole contents to DVD is not the best way to go. The reason for this is it will turn all your files read-only and might truncate long filenames and/or directories. Solution? If you back up to a DVD, put everything into a big zip file.

If you can boot your XP machine with the DOS drive attached as a slave, one trick that's saved me is just copying the whole contents of the tiny drive onto a folder on the XP machine for safe keeping. If your DOS machine can boot into win 9x and is networked, you can copy the drive contents over the network instead.

I hope this helps.

I would use ZIP or RAR to compress data first (Adds CRC check) and to reduce size before copying/moving the files.

Okay. Let's see if I have this right... I can slave the DOS drive to my XP box and then create a ZIP file which I can then burn to DVD? In order to restore this I could slave the new blank HD I want to use to the XP box and then extract the ZIP file to it and then hook the new restored DOS drive to my retro rig? Would there be any issues with this?

I am using DOS 6.11. If I want to hook up the new 80 gig drive will it just read it as 2 gigs straight off? I don't mind if it does. The main purpose of doing this is to put a newer more reliable drive in the DOS machine and not to give me 80 gigs of DOS drive which is far too much for me anyway.

The Laplink idea is nice. Although if slaving the drive works okay I don't mind doing that anyway.

Thanks for all the help so far guys! 😁

For restoring to a blank drive, you would first want to FDISK, FORMAT, and SYS the drive on the retro PC. And then put the files back.

You should be able to get more than 2 GB out the 80 GB drive. I had an old PC with a 4 GB drive in. IIRC, I had it partitioned into 4 x 1 GB, with one of the partitions dedicated to the OS and programs, one for my documents, and the 3rd for images of my Win95 CD, and my driver files. I don't remember what I had on the 4th (but it is always nice with a spare).

Do i have to partition it or do you have to in order to be able to use more of the hard drive?

You MUST partition it. But no-one is forcing you to make more than a SINGLE partition 😀

I don't remember the details, but I believe that an FAT-16 partition can not be more than 2 GB. An FAT-32 can be larger - maybe 32 GB or something.

But the major problem you will have with the BIOS is, that in order to "reach" further into the drive (and not just work on the outer edge of the drive), the BIOS must know how to address / direct the read/write head far into the disk. And some BIOS'es only know how to handle small "disk-addresses" (cylinders, heads, and sector numbers).

It is a little bit of an art....

Yeah, I think I remember that now. It's been a while since I last did that. Thanks for the help everyone.

FAT32 can handle partitions up to 2 Terabytes in size, but will choke performance-wise long before that

2000/XP/2003 limit FAT32 partitions to 32gb when formatting. You need to use DOS v7 or some other utility to create a partition bigger than that.