Upgrading hard drive - do I need to reinstall everything?

Hi -
As the title suggests, I'm thinking of upgrading my 40gig hard drive to something bigger and was wondering how to shift all my stuff off and back on again? I have a 250gig external firewire which I can use but had heard of "mirror imaging" the whole hard drive. Does this mean I won't have to reinstall my OS and software (InDesign, Photoshop etc) from the original disks and then upgrade via the web etc?
Thanks

If there is sufficient space on the external hard drive, you can make a "disk image" of your internal drive on it using Disk Utility. The disk image is stored in a single file, which can be mounted on your desktop like a hard drive. The disk image serves as a backup and duplicate of the original disk.
Once you install the new drive, you can run Disk Utility and restore from that disk image. When complete, your new drive will have exactly the same content as your old drive. You will not need to reinstall anything.
Does your external drive have a Tiger installed on it? In other words, is it bootable?

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