windy1 - get yourself a copy of Norton Ghost or similar (I know there are other products sometimes discussed on this forum)
From there you can clone the drive - including the "hidden" manufacturer's restore partition - either onto another hard disk which is ready to go should your's fail(1), or into an image file you can store on DVD(2).
Ghost supports USB connected devices, so even from a laptop (where there's usually only one hard drive slot) you can clone direct to another hard disk using a USB caddy...
In case 1, where you've cloned the hard disk onto another hard disk just plug in and away you go.
In case 2 (image file) you can boot-up from the Ghost (program) CD and then re-copy the image (on the DVD) onto new hardware.
It is easier than it sounds
