How do I image a 250GB hard drive featuring a Windows 7 install to a smaller 160GB hard drive

The total installation on the 250GB hard drive (will be) much, much less than 160GB.

I'm about to install Windows 7 to a 250GB 7.2k RPM because of the need to have a machine up and running today. In about a week, I will have to switch out this drive for a 160GB 10k RPM drive.

How can I go about doing the install and then the image and make this is painless as possible?

If the content used on the 250 is small enough create an new empty partition on the 250 using perhaps 100gb.(102400MB) Do that in win7 by going to My Computer, right click select Manage>Disk Management. Select C: and right click, shrink partition the amount of MB to shrink can be 102400 This should then give you a small enough installed OS partition to transfer to the new 160.

It is up to you and what you are comfortable with but I have used

http://clonezilla.org/

http://www.partimage.org which clonezilla uses.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php has some good tools as well.

All free stuff and you can transfer this new smaller partition to the new drive.

Here is what I would do: Take your 250GB drive and partition it into two equal parts, do your install onto partition 1, after the 160GB arrives go ahead and run your backup of partition 1 to partition 2 on the 250GB drive, install 160GB hard drive, then restore from partition 2 of the 250GB drive to the 160GB drive. Windows 7 install/backup utility should handle all of this for you.

I think GImageX from the WAIK can create .WIM images of a current partition, and write them to a bigger partition.