...but I've heard rumors that cold imaging from the version 8.5 SRD is more successful.  The Restore Anyware feature will obviously not work for a Linux box.

I would think that Ghost would do the trick, but BESR most definetly not. 

For ghost, boot from some bootable media and do a sector by sector copy.  More than likely it's that your filesystem in use is not recognized by DOS or WinPE(which ever is your pre-boot environment)

Good luck

The results of my testing are by no means authorative, since my Linux skills have gone down the drain since becoming a Windows admin. :-)))

I built a couple of quick and dirty CentOS 5.2 workstations and was able to image their ext2 ext3, and swap partitions while booted to the version 8.5 SRD.  Volume Groups really seemed too mess with the process, so I manually created /boot, root (/) and swap partitions for testing.  Recovering to the existing servers seemed to work fine.  Bare metal with blank drives was not successful.  In a Linux Rescue environment, I was able to restoe the GRUB bootloader and run fsck and tune2fs to recover the journals.  However booting always ended up with a kernel panic with failure trying to locate the root partition.  I believe Linux keeps closer track of the sector and track assignments, and that was causing the problem with the recovered systems.  Probably a better Linux admin than me could get it to work, but I'm abandoning the test systems for now.  I'm planning to test the open source utility, Partition Image to see if I have better luck with that.  It does have better capabilities to backup and restore Linux partition tables as well as Linux partitions from what I've read.