Hard drive upgrade G5 iMac questions

[d2bernhard]

I have 2 G5 iMacs and an external FireWire Drive. All have data on them. All three drives are bootable with 10.4.11. I want to upgrade HDD in one of the G5s and restore old drive to it. Then I need to restore backups made with Backup to the new HDD. What is best way to do this without losing data? I don't want to overwrite my external drive, yet, because it has backups (Made with Mac Backup) in it I want to restore (made before I ran out of space).

I am running 10.4.11

Should I:
Temporarily Install old HDD in the Other iMac (it's getting opened for ram swap anyway)
Install new HDD in iMac
Use target disk mode to connect the iMacs
use SD to make a bootable copy on new HDD

Then
restore Mac backups to new HDD
(now I am clear to blow away external drive and back up to it using SD.)

Then
reinstall other old HDD back in Other imac -- done with that one

OR should I make a sparse image to the external drive and restore to new drive from that?
Thanks!

[dnanian]

Given your constraints, I'd use target disk mode.