making recovery discs

I have seen other systems that provide you with a set of bootable recovery discs for the operating system and all the software on it. Is there any way of making your own set of bootable recovery discs for a home built system? What I want to do is after I have installed my operating system and all my software I want to create a set of bootable recovery discs that will reinstall everything I put on the system that first day in case I should have to or just want to reformat and make a fresh start. Can this be done, if so how? Thanks in advance.

Depends which operating system. If you're using a version of Windows, the set of install CDs always doubles as your recovery discs. Don't know about mac, but with linux, u can always boot up with Knoppix LiveCD. It can boot OVER all versions of windows too. And it will boot a computer without a harddrive or operating system. I found it to be very useful when my computer didn't start up once.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

What I want to do is backup my complete system on 2 or 3 cd's the first which is bootable just like the recovery discs you get with an emachine, only it will have my own setup on there.

You could get yourself a copy of norton ghost (i think), thats the same thing as the emachines program runs off.
alternatively you can create a slipstreamed cd and create .bat files to install the necessary graphic card drivers etc in the xp installation.

guide here:

http://www20.tomshardware.com/howto/20040908/winxp-sp2-integration-01.html