you were onto something with the previous link. I can create the necessary bootable thumbdrive to do the recovery independent of having an HDD with the OS installed fine.
I can even make the initial partition fairly small on the thumbdrive so as to have a larger space as a second partition formatted ntfs where the image will be located... EXCEPT windows doesn't easily allow one to make a thumbdrive (or any "removable" drive) multi-partition. so here is the quandary now.
I see a Lexar utility...
http://www.wikihow.com/Partition-a-Thumb-Drive but it isn't working with my current thumbdrive (a sandisk)... anyhow, I'd like a way to "flip the bit" by command line or something not so sneaky, and easier.
upshot : need to multi-partition a thumbdrive, so I can have the boot partition be fat32, and the rest be ntfs.
one more thing with how my procedure works, the boot drive (c:) that I am making the backup of, it will be on a drive that has the backup located on a different partition on the same drive... then I had planned to copy those backup files to the thumbdrive. so no making of backup straight to thumbdrive... the thumbdrive backup is only needed if the boot drive goes completely down.