At the risk of seeming glib, I suggest you try Casper 7.0 (30 day trial). It creates a fully bootable clone of your C drive, which you can then keep updated by just copying the partition alone (and not the boot sector/partition table/Windows system partition).
By definition, the backup will always be able to boot for recovery because it is running Windows with the relevant drivers installed.
I've used this method a couple of times to backup an SSD 'C' drive to a partition on a larger HDD in the same PC. I then use the rest of the HDD for data ('D' drive). The PC can boot from either drive.
Alternatively, you can backup to a bootable external (USB) drive. The limitations are that drives have to be locally attached, multiple versions would be a hassle, and you can only create one boot image per drive. The upside is no significant downtime if C drive fails, just slower operation until you replace the failed drive.
Alternatively, go and download the
free version of Paragon Backup. It's always been slower than TrueImage, but AFAIK it has the option of a Windows boot image for recovery.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the TI Linux boot disk doesn't work at all. Have you tried a different Linux boot CD for research purposes?