Help relating to replacing an internal drive

[Nigell]

I've a MacBook Pro, and I've purchased a 160G to replace the 100G drive it came with. I just need to clarify exatly what I need to do to copy everything from the first drive to the second. I've also just bought a case for the old drive, to convert it to an external drive and I've a LaCie external firewire drive, which has stuff backed up onto it but is easily able to take the contents of the MacBook Drive onto it before copying back to the fresh hard disk.

So. . .

How do I
a) Copy the contents of the old internal drive to the external LaCie drive, before copying all that onto the new, blank internal drive.

and

b) to do this do I need to initialise the new drive with OS X, before copying stuff back across, or is copying everything back onto the MacBook all I need to do? And is SuperDuper especially good at doing that?

or

As I will theoretically have the old internal drive in a case, could I start up the MacBook with the OS X DVD (or CD) then plug in the old internal drive (which I've put in a shiny new case) and just drag everything from that to the new drive? Or should I just add the new drive, initialise it with OS X and then replace all the files that are on the old HD onto the new one?

thanks so much.

Nigel