The System Rescue CD is awesome! I've had some issues with Partimage - mainly issues with not reading the doco first however

My idea was to be able to get rid of BESR so whatever program I go with will basically need to be able to backup an office of Windows XP host.

I prefer partImage, its really a good one!

Terabyte unlimited has two programs that might work for you: one is Image for Linux and the other is Bootit. The first works under linux; the second is pure bare metal. These take some slogging through opaque documentation, but seem to fit your bill.

Macrium Reflect
 

You may like to consider Macrium Reflect if like me you want something very simple and easy to use. They have packaged up a bunch of Linux tools into a neat UI, that will do partition imaging on-the-fly on Windows 2003/XP/Vista using the shadow copy feature. You could in principle backup to a networked samba share. While the UI appears a bit too simple for advanced tasks, they use XML files to define the backup parameters, which can be edited as needed.

Ken

Linux recovery of Windows workstations - using baremetal recovery
 

hey why dont you try Stellar Phoeix linux recovery which is capable for Ext2, Ext3 & Reiser file system.it works well in linux operating system and may be it can solve you problem.you can also check out linux information from here Stellar Phoenix Linux data Recovery.
gud luck....