[Blind-sysadmins] imaging windows 8

Hello, I've got a couple of windows 8 boxes I'd like to image. I'm wanting to do a complete image, not just the data, and use it in the future in case of drive hardware failure. My goal take the image, probably from outside of windows itself from talking media? then in the event of hardware failure, buy a new drive, put it in, restore the image, and give the box back to it's owner and go on with things. In the really old days I used to use Ghost from floppy disk and have it run from batch file. I've tried image for windows from a win7PE boot environment and although that worked in creating the image, even put it where I wanted it, it wouldn't boot on restore. Is there a trick to imaging nowadays? Recommendations? Thanks. Dave.