"BeeJ" wrote in message ...
I have a Laptop with Win7 Pro, 4GRam, DVD RW and 400GBytes free on the
C: drive with one partition. Win7 plus my apps uses about 80GBytes.

I am sure this has been discussed before but hoping for the benefit of
more experience from those who have done this more recently.

I need to keep my current Win7 setup, call it the pristine
installation, make a full backup (registry, the works) and be able to
install this pristine installation in order of preference:
Quickly
From internal store (backup file or another partition)
From the laptop itself (rather than putting in a Linux CD or other)
i.e. one click restore

Creating a 100G partition on the C: to make a D: is acceptable since
that leave me with 300G free but other methods are OK if fast.

I only have USB2 ports, Ethernet connector, WIFI and the DVD for I/O.

Preferably using free backup/restore software.

No virtual Window is allowed.



You can't restore a saved image to a booted drive, so you'll have to boot from a cd
to restore an image to the C: drive.
The safest way is to buy an external usb drive and use Windows to save a system
image to it. At the same time create a repair cd to boot from when you want to
restore your image.