Help - noob struggles to fix Vista disk he broke

Using DDS v10.0 build 2,117

Have Vista laptop with 80gb disk. Approx 30gb of that is free.

Disk has one 40gb partition, one hidden partition and the rest empty space. I tried using DD to delete the hidden partition and merge the empty space into one partition.

I ran thru the steps in DDS and rebooted etc. Experienced error messages and now can't reboot from the disk. So I use DDS on a recovery disk to boot the laptop and am now viewing the disk. It says its properties are 'Pri, Act' which I think is correct for booting from. However, it also says it is completely full (74.53). I seem unable to do anything to the disk with DDS because it says 'the disk is full'. I would like to be able to make a second partition on it so I can use the laptops recovery cd to reinstall vista on that second partition. Any ideas anyone? All suggestions gratefully received.
I have a spare laptop (XP) and a spare internal/external USB hard disk BTW.

 

You should be using build 2,160 or later for Vista.

Is DD showing a red "C" on the partition graphic?

Can you run a chkdsk /f on the partition to check for errors?

Do you have a current backup image of the drive?

 

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I did some more forum reading after posting and realized then that the old version of Acronis was at fault . So I quit trying to fix that and just did a recovery using Active@ File Recovery software. Lesson learned!