Testing setup before switching domain?

[Pitrow]

Ok, here's the deal. I'm setting up a zen cart for a friend. He currently has his site hosted on another server, but we're switching to a new one once the cart is up and running.

The new server is running Plesk, which I'm not overly familiar with. I'm trying to setup the cart, but I'm running into problems with the urls. Since he has the site up and running we don't want to transfer the DNS settings to the new server until the cart is ready to go. But the cart doesn't work, because every time I try to setup anything or go to the admin section it trys to use the actual domain name (which points to the other sever) and I get page not found errors because the files don't exist on that server.

So, how do I set it up so that I can use the cart and get it all setup without using the actual domain name. I suppose I would use something like http://www.host.com/~username if this were a cpanel server, but being that it's a plesk server you have to use the funky plesk preview function to even view the site before the domain name is setup.

I'm sure someone must have run across this before. Anyone have any tips for me?

Thanks.

[kobra]

If this has a dedicated IP - use the IP # in the configure.php files in place of the domain name and once repointed you can edit these and add the domain name