Transferring data to a New Hard Drive?

Is there a way to transfer everything from my Main Hard drive (boot volume, programs, plugins, etc.) to an external firewire drive and then back onto a new larger hard drive that will replace the old one with any certainty that it will work without data loss.
Here's the detailed story in hopes of clarifying the above.
I want to replace my Main Macintosh Hard Drive, the one with the operating system and all of my important programs with a 300GB ATA Hard Drive. I have all of the internal drive bays filled with smaller 160GB hard drives on my 1Ghz Dual PowerPC G4 mirrored door drive.
I am in the process of new iMovie projects and other things like Garage Band and need more hard drive space for some apps that need to be loaded on the booted volume of my main hard drive (like Garage Band).
Since I no longer have room to transfer data it looks like I will have to buy an external drive to transfer data. My biggest worry and fear is loosing my OS10.4.4 boot disk and some of the programs with all their plugins and preferences and whatever else that may not transfer correctly from the internal drive to the external firewire drive. I will then have to transfer everything back from the firewire drive to the new 300 GB Hard Drive without any data loss.
Is this possible? I've heard of cloning a hard drive onto another disc but I'm not sure if this will work or not. I can't afford to lose any of my programs, plugins or operating system. It would shut my wife's art business down.
Please help me because I'm stuck in not being able to really do any more work. I already had to move my iTunes and iMusic folder to one of the other Hard Drives and now about 200 of my purchased songs have to be manually found. What a pain!
Thanks for the guidance.
Lou Hosta
darsart.com
browndogbooks.com

Hi Lou!
Yes, you can easily do what you want. Disk Utility has the capability of making a disk image that can be used to restore your system. However, I don't do it that way so I will recommend trying either Carbon Copy Cloner (my personal favorite) or SuperDuper (really, really easy). Either one of these programs will allow you to make a bootable clone of your drive on another disk.
Cheers!
MDD Dual 1.25 G4 | 2GB RAM | Mac OS X (10.4.4) | Logic Pro 7.1.1 | AMT8 | Delta 44 | SoundDiver 3.1 PB2

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