First of all, hi all! My first post on these forums

Allright, here is the situation:

Currently I'm running a windows 2003 advanced server in a big windows network. For various reasons this fileserver is used as an image server where 200+ ghost images reside for tons of pc's and different configurations.
Currently I boot the computers from a DOS cd I configured, it automaticly detects the network card, installs the driver of the network card, requests an ip adress from the dhcp server, maps a network drive and launches ghost. Now the user just has to select the right ghost image and it will be installed (or puts an image of the computers harddisk on the server).

At least thats the theory ...

Everything runs fine untill ghost tries to read the mapped drive on the server. The server has two raid 5 sets witch have been combined into one big 350 GB volume. Using volumes involves using NTFS, but DOS can't handle NTFS. Using NTFSDos isn't a solution either since it seems to crash half of the computers. On top of that DOS only recognises 2GB of the harddisk space, making ghost believe there isn't enough room left to write the image to the mapped drive. Using FAT16 isn't a solution either since this limits me to using 32GB partitions, not really managable in my situation.

So, DOS is killing me here so I was looking for a linux alternative.

Here come the questions:

Can I use knoppix to do this?
Is there any way to trick ghost and make it believe its running in DOS?
As an alternative can I use any type of linux imaging software to make/restore all the images (it has to be able to make a full 1 - 1 copy of a windows hdd partition including the MBR an excluding the free space, on top of that it has to be able to cropress the images to limit network traffic and hdd space)?

I am pretty familiar to linux as a user, but not as an administrator, so I'm not really capable to do all the nice stuff in linux