It appears there is a bug in the Complete Backup that ships in Server 2008. This bug prevents you from doing a recovery backup which is the best feature of the backup tool in 2008. The bug occurrs if you have an OEM EISA config partition. If that OEM partition is marked active the backup job will fail before even starting. The only workaround is to temporarily make your C: drive the active partition, do the backup and then inactive the partition. Alternatively when building the server if you make sure to remove all partitions from OEM on boot drive it should prevent this from happening.
More details can be found at this link and this link which are threads on Microsoft's TechNet forums.
One other interesting note is that it appears this bug or something similar existed in the shipping version of Vista (close relative of Server 2008) according to KB938316 and KB946010. The root problem seems to be a problem with the backup/restore engine not being able to handle the active partition being different from boot/system partition. Hopefully this can get fixed.
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