you download all the wordpress files.
if you want to copy the content, than you take a backup of your current database as well.
thanks,
I received this from the good folks over at XAMPP
Mike
In your path tree on your hosted server my guess is you will not have the wordpress folder as normally you would install to the web root of your server and all the config paths in WordPress use relative paths ie. /wp-admin/install.php
So you can’t use this path in XAMPP to go to /wp-admin/install.php which equates to http://localhost/wp-admin/install.php which does not exists (404 error) – web root (or ServerRoot) is htdocs folder which is / in XAMPP and you have /wordpress/ as your root for WP.
The WP chain of command goes like this:
install.php requires wp-config.php which requires wp-settings.php which contains all the relative path information.
So when you go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php (also note the install.php in the address not just simply install) it tries to find and load the above files but because /wordpress/ is not in the relative path it fails with a 404 not found error in your browser.
Sounds complex because it is when you try and mirror an installation on a hosted Linux Apache server with one in a Windows Apache server.