Booting from USB flash disk

[KenWA]

I had a netbook and used a backup program to image the drive on a bootable USB stick which also contained the program so that, in the event of a catastrophe, I could boot from the USB stick and restore the drive image.

I have now acquired a ThinkPad X200 running Win 7 Pro (64) and as there is no ThinkVantage Recovery option under Win 7 I wish to set up a similar system to boot from USB. Readiing the Access Help I find mention of USB floppy disk and USB CD but no mention of flash disk. This may be because the help file is now a bit dated but wondered if anyone knows whether it is possible to create a bootable flash disk in the ThinkPad running Windows 7.