File based disk imaging question (with a long introduction)

My cousin's computer has an OCZ branded Samsung MLC SSD, which is known to have performance issues. The nature of the performance issues I will not bother to describe, as they are so strange it is difficult to fully describe them in less than 1000 words. I will just state that they involve random writes.

I built his system for him 3 months ago (when the drives had first hit the market and before the issue was widely known). At that time, I tried to find I did some internet research on the issue (again, the last time I had done it nothing useful came up). Today some new software was installed on his computer, which caused him to run into the random write issues. I didn't like this, so I again did some internet research on the issue and this time, it seems that other people have figured out how to fix the problems he is experiencing. The fix is based on slide 10 of the following Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation (that details the changes that are being made in Windows 7 for SSDs) and requires repartitioning the drive to properly align its sectors to SSD pages.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/f/d/afdfd50d-6eb9-425e-84e1-b4085a80e34e/WNS-T432_WH07.pptx

An explanation of part of the problem (the other part being poor controller design by Jmicron) is at technet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb643097.aspx

Partition alignment instructions are on OCZ's forums:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=325221

My cousin has a working Windows installation at the moment and he has all of the programs, device drivers, updates, etcetera that he needs at the moment. I would like to effectively realign the partition on his SSD without affecting anything else. As a consequence, I would like to do a file based image of his entire hard drive, follow the partition alignment instructions on OCZ's forums and then restore his operating system, device drivers, programs, etcetera as they were.

I know this should be possible as Microsoft has tools that deploy Windows Vista using this exact technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Imaging_Format

Is there any way I can use these tools with Windows XP to do what I want to achieve (backup everything, wipe the drive clean and then reload it after I have recreated and formatted the system partition correctly)? I have a copy of Vista so I have that at my disposal, even though I don't use Vista.