I'm going through the same process myself. I haven't had any trouble using k3b to burn a disc, but I'm having trouble getting the files to k3b from my crashed XP drive.

I don't know how to burn directly from the XP drive. When I try to open the hard drive in k3b, it puts the drive on the list to burn. Obviously I'm not going to be able to burn a 57 Gig hard drive on a CD.

I can drag small files to the desktop & burn from there. But if I get more than about 300 Meg in combined files or one large file, it locks up trying to move to the desktop.

I'd love to save some of those large files, & I don't want to only burn about 200 Megs per CD to back up my old drives.