Make recovery disk windows7 upgrade from Vista

Win7 Backup Imaging will allow you to back up your image to a network if you've got one. Acronis will also allow this. With Win7 you have to password the target machine to get the image onto or off of it.

I have never heard of an external not being recognized by Win7 when plugged in. When it prompts for CD to search for drivers, is there a link to tell it instead to search on internet? Go into Device Manager and see if it is listed under Hard Drives, click on it and use Driver tab to update over internet.

You really want your Backup Image to go on an external or secondary internal HD as first choice - using that many DVD's could be a mess. But in the meanwhile you can save it to a primary formatted partition on your Windows 7 HD. It can reimage the same HD from that partition if you bork your Win7.

Ok I have a second hard drive on my PC. I think I will just use that one. Best pratical solution for the moment I guess.

Do I need to pasword that one too? And how do I do that lol. Sorry again.

Use DIsk Management to format a Primary partition (given a letter) to store your image, then open Backup Center, select Create an Image, it will scan the HD's and find the partition by letter and size available.

Tell the IMaging app to save the backup image there. Afterward, it will offer to make a Repair CD which has the same Repair console as is on the Win7 DVD.

Now test the image by booting into the WIn7 DVD Repair console or the Repair CD, select "Recover using an Image" and see if it detects the image partition, cue up image to see if it is ready to reimage your HD or a replacement.