Recommendation on a Method to Install Win7 Using USB (Thumb) Drive

I've made bootable USB drives before, and the methods are always changing and some are better than others, so I figure people here probably know what the best/easiest/fastest way to make a bootable USB drive to install Win7 64-bit on a spare "D:" drive.

My system:

C: System, daily use drive
D: Extra 320 Gbyte drive to experiment with
G: 2 Tbyte "Data" drive

I've been mounting an .ISO image of Win7 in the C: drive and trying to install Win7 on the Extra D: drive, with mixed results. The 1st time was a "success", but it called itself the "D:" drive when you booted from it. Bad.

2nd, 3rd and 4th times all failed to install at all. Something went wrong, and then something went wrong with the rollback too. On the last attempt, Startup Repair launched and when I finally got my O/S back, it had the "Not Genuine" nag screen. I did some reading and Daz says that this is because Startup Repair ran and overwrote the MBR. (See, I'm one of those people that RTFM...)

So, I'm thinking I've put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger too many times and eventually it's going to spatter my brains everywhere, so no more trying to install from a mounted image on the C: drive.

Note: The 2nd time I interupted the installation process immediately after the 1st shutdown and reboot, in order to disconnect the C: drive, thinking I could force the Win7 installer to call the unused "D:" drive "C:". I also made a point of removing an assigned drive letter. That installation failed and entered an endless reboot loop.

Eventually, I remembered something about either the F6 or F7 keys, and hit both alternating quickly and got into a menu that allowed me to select my old Win7 O/S and not the "rollback" option. Brought me back to life.

3rd attempt, I named the D: drive "D:" again for purposes of doing the Win7 installation, with the idea that perhaps the 2nd attempt failed because the O/S couldn't "see" the drive because it didn't have a letter name, and naming it "D:" was better than no letter name at all. Also failed.

Mentioning all of this so that perhaps someone can tell me what was really happening that I didn't understand.

Either which way, my end-goal here is to have a 2nd, "disposable" O/S that I can use to learn how to use Sandboxie, and do other risky computing without jeapardizing my primary O/S with infection and the consequences of my stupidities.

Second Bonus Question:

I can start a new thread for this, or not, as people suggest. Given this history (above), I'm interested in creating an image file of my System Disk, so that if it ever does go tits-up, I can use the image file to recreate the disk. So suggestions on softwares and methods on that would also be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

I found this on my own:

hxxp://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/23687-Windows-7-Installation-Guide