Hard Drive Backup Questions

Hi all

I'm a trial and error type of system fiddler, and every once in-awhile I do enough damage to my system that it requires a reformat and reinstall of all software.
As everyone knows, it is a time consuming job to reformat and reinstall all your software. Plus downloading software and driver updates takes forever too.
My last reformat and reinstall took eight hours over two days to complete. I don't want to have to do that again. Its boring and if you make a mistake you have to start over again.
Now that I have my system all set up the way I like it, I would like to copy my entire hard drive to an external firewire hard drive. But before I purchase an external hard drive I need to know if I can use that way? Is there special software I need to purchase? etc.
What I want to do would be to image my internal hard drive in a state that I am content with onto an external firewire hard drive for back up purpose only.
Eventually when I do enough damage to my system from messing around and fiddling too much I would like the ablity to reformat my internal drive and copy my back up image from the firewire drive.
Is this possible? What kind of problems will I encounter?

Thanks


<font color=red><i>Doctor Hooter</i></font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.page3.com/" target="_new"><b>(·Y·)</b></A>