Tosibia normally provides a utility to create (1) a bootable DVD disk to "start" the repair or re-installation process and (2) will create multiple DVDs to do the restore from.
With win 7, I prefer cassandraf's approach. That is to use Windows 7 backup feature (also include in Vista bussiness and higher). As indicated by cassandraf you can create a bootable repair/restore DVD. However you need to also image your "C" drive (will also include that little 100 Meg system Partition. While the option allows placing the image to DVDs typically 3 to 5), HDD and thumbdrive I've had problems with doing them to DVDs (Could be that my DVD writes are all Blu-ray Rom/DVD-RW drives. Kept telling me I need a disk greater than 1 G - DAH DVDs are 4.3 gigs Also, even though My thumb drives are large enough (1 W/32 Gigs and 1 w/64 Gigs) it bulks at using a thumb drive. BUT works great with a USB HDD. I have one 2 1/2 in USB HDD dedicated to Image file backups (Use for 3 Desktops and two laptops).
I messed up my Win 7 64 Bit. I had made a image file to 2nd HDD. Booted from orignal Installation disk (the Bootable disk you would create would work also) and restored the file to my "C" drive - Booted right up, only lost a few emails that were received over the past month.