Overwriting boot partition in WinXP+

[Dave]

Apologies if this is the wrong forum in which to ask such a
question, but what I want to do is probably either easy or impossible,
and I'd like to know either way so that I can pursue or abandon this
approach, as warranted...

Here's the situation: I need to be able to copy a clean image of
{WinXP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008 R1, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2}
onto a system's boot partition or drive, then boot from it. The usual
Windows boot tools such as bootcfg (WinXP) and BCDEdit (Vista+) don't
seem to apply here, as Windows refuses to overwrite a boot partition
for understandable security reasons. However, I think it ought to be
possible to use, say, a minimal Linux distro (Gentoo? Ubuntu?
Knoppix?) as a bootstrapper in order to get around this.

Has anyone tried a similar approach? If so, what works? This
seems particularly hairy in the newer Windows OSes which do away with
the old human-readable Boot.ini file and encrypt the relevant Registry
entries.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you may be able to
provide.

-- Dave