New
#61
I hope restore to factory state still works! Please test it now... of course don't start the actual restore!
I assume you have an external disk with a lot of free space. Backup is just "put 1 or more partition" to a single file. I have a program that can that. Of course you can also restore from it. But a nice extra feature is: You can mount that single file as a virutal disk! So you can see the files and drag and drop to new win7.
Imaging with free Macrium
Note
The production of the WinPE recovery CD (which is highly recommended) may take up to 3 hours because Macrium needs to download the 1.7GB WAIK (Windows Application Installation Kit). For your convenience I have uploaded a ready made .iso of the WinPE recovery disc. That can be downloaded in appr. 8 minutes which clearly beats the WAIK download. Once you downloaded and unzipped the folder, you can burn it directly to a CD with e.g. ImgBurn.
Here is the link to my Skydrive site.
I draw your attention to the fact that this WinPE CD can also be used to make images. That may be convenient in case you do not want to install Macrium on your PC.
So download that file and do the backup