Backing Up My System

I recently had to buy a new hard drive and was an idiot and hadn't backed up my old one before it failed. After reinstalling Windows and all the drivers, I'm wanting to back up my whole system right now before I start installing useless junk, for in the event that I might need to format it or other such things and I don't want to have to reinstall every driver and every little thing that I DO have already over again.

I'm running Windows XP SP2, I used the Windows CD to install "Backup" on my computer. I have tried to back up my files however it will not work. It continually comes up with errors. I've tried backing up the files to various destinations, whether it be multiple floppys, CD's, DVD's, removable drives, etc.

I have also heard that using the Windows backup program, you cannot backup to CD/DVD's. Which is lame.

My preferred method would be backing up to DVD's. Does anyone know if I can get Windows Backup to backup there? And if it can, does anyone know how to have it do it? If it can't do it, what would be the suggested software to use for it? Roughly 3-9 Gig's of stuff (As I was going to back up everything which would be 9 GB, but decided that there's probably a bunch of stuff I could leave out)