Windows 7 recovery CD

Create a Windows 7 recovery CD on external hard/flash drive?
basically, my windows 7 computer went through a windows update that epically ****** up. now windows 7 wont even boot on my laptop.

i dont have any blank cd's/dvd's to burn an iso image to, but i have the iso image, and an external hard drive that i have partitioned.

would it be possible to create the recovery cd on the hard drive partition, then boot from the external hard drive and run it? im really running out of ideas.

also, the windows 7 usb/dvd tool wont work on ANY of my computers for some reason. it will only let me install to a flash drive, not my external hard drive, and then it formats my flash drive, and then tells me that its not compatible, so i need some other way to make it bootable.

I would be very surprised if a Windows update damaged your boot drive beyond repair or recovery. Have you tried running a startup repair?

If you do have to run a fresh install then the easy way would be to find someone who can burn the dvd's for you but if that's impossible you may be able to run an install by extracting the install files from the iso to your external hard drive but you would still have to find some way of booting your machine to an op sys as just extracting the files will not make your external drive bootable.