Ok, so I'm feeling rather pathetic for not being able to figure this out but anyway, here goes... I have a Debian system that I've been using on my laptop for ages now, it's Debian Sid. Runs like a charm, I have no problems. My hard drive is a little too small for my needs so I have a nice shrink wrapped replacement sitting on the table here ready to be installed. My laptop has an internal DVD/CDRW drive and an external USB DVD+/-RW drive.

What I'm looking for, basically, is if there is a way for me to back up my system onto DVDs (currently using ReiserFS, if that is an issue for certain backup scenarios), put the new HD in and then dump the backup data back on to the new drive? I don't particularly want to re-install the system so is there a LiveCD out there that someone could recommend to me that could take care of this sort of thing? Oh, and just to make it more fun (yeah you can tell I come from a Windows "Just Ghost It" backup background) I'd like to use ext3 as the file system on the new drive... And network backups are out of the question since this is the only computer I have here in the house, oh yeah and I share wireless with the neighbor who's on vacation right now and so, I cannot simply install sarge and then do a dist-upgrade as I won't have access to my wireless card and I have no wired connection to the 'net... does this all make any sense? sorry for sounding a little confusing but I'm a little confused myself right now with this issue... lol

I'm sure there's probably a simple command that comes with every linux distro that will do this but I'm having one hell of a time trying to find it.

Any help is truly appreciated, thanks!

Do you have enough connectors in your box to have both hard drives plugged in at once? If so, connect the second drive (in the slot where it will eventually live, so you may have to swap it with the first drive). Now boot with a live CD, create the partitions on the new drive, create file systems in the partitions and mount them. Mount the partitions from the old drive and copy the system over. For example:
You'll have to tweak your /etc/fstab and your boot loader, but it should work for you...

Unfortunately that's not an option but while poking around some more I came upon a program called mkCDrec which seems to create disaster recovery live backup CDs or DVDs... has anyone used this? It almost looks like it could be perfect for this type of thing. I suppose I could try it, if it doesn't work I can always default back to the smaller drive until I figure it out.