Does anyone know of a good backup software that will backup your whole harddrive to a dvd and let you boot from that dvd and clone the harddrive and make the new harddrive boot and be the same as the original. My harddrive is going out and I need to get a new one but I don't want to reinstall all my stuff.

Symantec Ghost does that. Have you tried that before?

Hm, I don't see why you would bother with the DVD burning?

The easiest way is to simply keep the old drive, pop in the new one, and you are ready to go: extra storage space and no tinkering needed.

If you really want/need to take out the old drive I would say: leave the old drive in for now, pop in the new, and clone the old disk to the new... Much faster and less hassle then DVD burning. And once it's done you can safely remove the old drive.

Whatever you decide , make sure that you can boot into a recovery environment and that you understand how to restore the backup you made.
I have used DriveImage 7 with a bootable recovery cd, it made working backups to cd spanning two or more cd's, I didn't ever try DVD's.
Now I am using Norton Ghost9 but as yet I havn't burnt any backups to CD's or DVD's but it is meant to do that.
As far as replacing one hdd to another , that option is available aswell in Ghost9 here is some stuff copied from the help section :-

Well what i used to do is making image of the boot partiton and then copy the rest of the data manually, case you need to make a defferent number of partitions with a defferent sizes, simply make an image of your windows partiton and you can save it to the hard disk and use the bootable disk to restore it or you can make a bootable cd or dvd with it or multiple disks (i didnt actually try multiplae cds with ghost and if anyone tried it let me know please how reliable it is) or you can do cloning from the old partition to a new partition in the new HD and thats the easiest way.