Imaging a Win Vista HD using Parallels w/ Win XP on Mac?

I may be doomed from the start.

My daughters Win Vista laptop died. The HHD seems to be okay. It's under warranty and being sent back for repair. The repair process will erase data on the HHD. I yanked the HHD, put it in a dock and copied off the personal data (photos, video, school work, etc). To do this I used my MacBookPro utilizing Parallels (ver4). That seemed to work okay.

But I got it into my head that it would be far less frustrating when the laptop comes back if I could restore it from an image. Here is/was my plan and I'm looking for feedback if I'm barking up the wrong tree.

I purchased Acronis True Image Home 2010. I installed in on my MacBookPro, on my WinXP Parallels virtual drive. I also purchased a 1 Tb USB2 WD Passport external drive. I'm planning on sticking the bad laptop's HHD back into the dock and using my MacBook Parallels WinXp installation of ATI to image the bad laptop's HHD to the external WD HHD.

When the bad Win Vista laptop returns I intended to image that (erased of original data) HDD again, before trying to restore it, just to be on the safe side. Again I'd be yanking the HDD, putting it in the dock, and imaging it using the MacBook / Parallels / ATI / external WD HDD process again.

After imaging the Vista HDD I'd replace it, attach the external WD HHD to the Vista laptop, use the ATI Recovery CD to restore the original HHD image on the WD HDD to the Vista laptop.

In my mind's eye the process seemed sound. But I thought I'd run it by the experts in this forum to see what glaringly obvious factor I failing to take into account. Any feedback / advise will be greatly appreciated.

I know I'm using a Mac and that alone may alienate me from the herd. I should note that I was planning on using the same process to restore my old HP WinXP Pro laptop that died in the recent past. So I haven't completely gone to the "dark side".