[BBLISA] block level backup windows

[Edward Ned Harvey]

For windows server, I don't trust something like Ghost, unless you do the
-IA option, which does block-level backup of a partition, but then it's
difficult to backup the partition table, mbr, and so forth.

I also don't use exclusively something like BackupExec, or whatever to
backup "system state" because restoring is then very difficult too.  You
have to get the system to a known state (by installing windows and applying
all the same patches/hotfixes, etc) before you can restore system state.

Long and short of it:  I want to backup the first 1Mb (or 10Mb) of the hard
drive, to get the MBR and Partition table, and I want to use block-level
backup of the C: partition.  In addition, to use BackupExec to get the
system state and all the files.

The solution I normally use is:  I install dual-boot with Linux, and once
every couple of months I shutdown into linux, to use dd.  

This is great for me, but not great for my co-worker windows administrators
who are not good with Linux or dd.

Can anybody recommend a decent way to shutdown and get a good block-level
hard drive backup, which I haven't already thought of?