Acronis is the absolute dog's danglies. Believe me I've tried them all and it's by far the best.
The rescue disk is a bootable CD/DVD based on a Linux distro that gives you exactly the same GUI as the Windows run time environment. The boot disk also comes with good built-in SATA and networking support. An alternative is to use a Bart PE boot disk with an Acronis plug-in - you can then easily add any drivers you like to the boot device, eg if you want to do image recovery booting from a USB stick.