DDS fails to load TI11 Hangs

[Lowtrawler]

I have an Acer Aspire 5310 Laptop running Vista Home Premium. It came with an 80Gb hard drive partitioned as 10Gb Hidden for the original system image, 30Gb for the C drive and 40Gb for the D drive.

Having uninstalled all the software that came with the laptop that I didn't want and installed all the software that I did, I ran DDS and deleted the Hidden 10Gb partition. I then added the 10Gb of space to the C drive which has given me a C drive with 40Gb and a D drive with 40Gb.

I then wanted to create an Acronis Secure Zone and so ran True Image Home 11. Unfortunately, when trying to create the secure zone, it hung. I then tried to create a backup of the C drive to the D drive using Ti11 but again it hung. I then tried to startup DDS10 (build 2160) but DDS fails to laod, getting stuck at Analyzing partition D.

Nevermind I thought, I'll create bootable media and make the change from there. Unfortunately, DDS fails to load from the bootable media - failing at the same stage as under Windows (this applies to both the full and the safe version). TI11 also fails to perform in the same way as it does being run under Windows.

I badly need to create a backup of the system, having deleted the original backup that came with the laptop. Please help me to do this.

[sparkymachine]

Could you try deleting the D partition and starting again. You could leave the 40gb as unallocated and then use TI to create an SZ using it.
Not sure why you want an SZ on the same drive though. you would be better off creating it as a backup partition and managing it otherwise.

[Lowtrawler]

It would appear that deleting the original backup partition and reassigning the space to the C drive caused a disk geometry error. Consequently, any further low level disk activities, e.g. using any Acronis product, fail because the disk is seen as being corrupt.

I was finally able to make a backup using Driveimage XML but could not do so with Acronis, Paradox, Partitionmagic or a couple of other mainstream products.

Windows continues to work fine and I now have a backup so all is well. However, having searched high and low, this appears to be a known problem with Acer and so I would advise anyone planning to work on an Acer laptop to make any partition changes up front and then install from scratch.