I use and have used Drive Image for the last 5 years. It is a program you buy that takes a snapshot of your whole hard drive. You can then reload the whole drive or just parts of it.
When my sytem used to crash it would usually takle a whole weekend to reformat, reload and then 1 by 1 reload all the software.
Now 20 minutes.
Through corporate buyouts I guess now it's called Norton Ghost.