Backing up harddisk prior to failure

["Jonathan Matthews" <jaycee@jaycee.uklinux.net>]

Hi all

My server's harddisk is making weird noises and telling me at the
console that various things went wrong.
All in all, I reckon the drive is about to die.

How would people go about transferring the whole system (dpkg details
and all) over to another disk (which I'm just about to buy) and then
removing the faulty one?
I've got no problem with putting the two disks in concurrently, but I'm
not sure how to go about moving it all, short of bzipping each partition
up. Even then, would that actually guarantee a working system?

As an aside, I'd also be interested in any suggestions for drive
makes/models around the 10+gig mark that are competitively priced. Uk
specific if poss, Oxford specific even better :-)
It's to go in a P133, IDE system - nothing fancy here!

cheers,
jc