Knoppix Live CD and Bart's Preinstalled Environment live CD are the top recovery tools to consider.

I recently had yet another Hard Disk failure ( well it was a complete crash to be exact ) so this time around after having to setup Windows for the 3rd time in a few months I got my act together and decided to have a look around for solutions. Two of the best are the Knoppix Linux Live CD , a bootable cd that loads a full Linux installation along with major products like the open office suite and such. The second more popular to Windows users solution would be the Bart's Preinstalled Environment bootable cd. The later needs a Windows installation disk and using that it creates a bootable cd that loads a windowed environment along with most of the popular recovery utilities ( as long as you have them installed on your original machine and transfer them to the installation directory of the app ).
I suggest you give both choices a try and see which one fits your needs.
What I expected to find with my search was a utility like Norton Ghost that would make a bootable DVD that would copy my recent state of Windows to a new hard drive if my current one stopped working. This procedure can be done through Ghost as long as you have the Symantec Recovery CD but I still have my doubts if it can be done with a new different hard disc than the one used to make the backup.