Dead in the water-TI9 recovery won't boot

I have a severe problem on my hands.
TI9 (Home) will not boot, thus making restoration of a backup impossible.
I have read and followed the "Please read before you post" sticky but it does not help.
I have upgraded TI9 from build 2337 to build 3854, but the behavior is the same: when "Full" is chosen, the system proceeds to load but stops with a grey screen and the system just halts-indefinetely, and without any output to the screen. This happens regardless of whether I boot the TI9 recovery software off of a USB stick, CD or choosing "recovery" from within windows.
I have tried the "quiet acpi=noapic" option to no avail. In non-quiet mode I don't get as far as the #. It always just stops with a grey screen.

When I boot the software using the "Safe Mode" option, it loads just fine. But that is useless to me since the backups are stored on an external hard disk (in a USB2 enclosure). And by the way, nothing needs to be connected to the computer for TI9 to halt the system (other than the booting media with the TI9 software of course). I have tested booting into the TI9 recovery software on my other laptop (cheap Compaq Presario C303NR with Vista Home Basic) which always works fine.

Since this problem is something happening outside the Windows environment, it seems irrelevant to give any information about that (Windows) but just in case I am including that too.

True Image Home 9.0 build 3854.
The computer is an Acer laptop- Travelmate 3000 series (more precisely, 3002 WTCi). Centrino platform, Pentium-M 740 1.73 GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD. Windows XP Professional SP2 (recently newly installed). Has firewire and USB interfaces.
Acer included an "e-recovery" system which enables the backing up of the system but basically splits the hard disk capacity in half in order to keep a backup. There is a corresponding "D2D" (disk-to-disk recovery) setting in the laptop's bios, which I have disabled (Because I have TI9 and hence no need for it). The hard disk drive is in good repair (no errors in checkdisk).

What could be the cause of this problem?
If I upgrade to TI11, could I then get past the hang? But what if it will behave the same? And besides, since TI9 does all that I need, I'd prefer to just stick with that. Any ideas?

 

Run chkdsk /r on your system disk. There may be errors that are causing TI to hang. Also it may be worth it to check the memory with memtest - run it for about 4 hours.

 

Thank you for your reply, Mr. DwnNdrty.
I vaguely remember booting into TI9 once on that laptop (the Acer) for a restore a while ago (months ago) and it worked back then. The only thing that has changed since then is I swapped the memory modules in it (from 2 x 256MB PC4200 to 2 x 512MB PC5300).
I haven't run a checkdisk on the laptop yet, I will do that soon. I have had zero trouble with this computer apart from the TI9 boot issue, but at this point I'm willing to pretty much try anything. I'll do the memtest too.
It is really weird... Live-CD Linux distros like Knoppix 5.0, gparted live-cd (gentoo), ubuntu live-cd all boot fine, and initialize the USB and firewire interfaces in the process. TI9 recovery is based on linux but it won't boot...

 

How often has anyone actually found memory to be the cause? It's an easy thing to check and worth doing, but when that's done, you'll probably still need to contact Tech support to find out why ATI won't work with your hardware set up.