Windows – How to Create “Factory Reset” Image on Partitioned Drive

Foregoing the optical disk route, you might try getting an external hard drive that connects via USB. No need to get fancy - you can use a naked drive with a $20 adapter. Then, get a hard drive cloning program - I personally like Acronis True Image. This will allow you to clone your existing drive to the other drive, or store an image of the existing drive, that you can use the software to restore later.

As an aside: Are you sure the netbook has the required power to run Windows 7?

#include "obligatory DRM rant"

Lenovo, in their infinite wisdom, have changed how they store the fact that the recovery image has already been created in newer versions of their recovery software. Amusingly they have not bothered to correct the "Microsoft Window" typo as well!

Process Monitor reveals that recovburncd.exe reads the file Q:\FactoryRecovery\RECOVERY.INI:DONE before bugging out. The colon indicates the use of an alternate File Stream. After a recovery image has been created, this stream contains the string 1\r\n. Deleting the stream does not work, but replacing the stream contents with the string 0\r\n works. This can be done from the command prompt:

echo 0 > Q:\FactoryRecovery\RECOVERY.INI:Done