Weird partitions, need to factory restore

I have a new Acer 5720G with Vista preinstalled.

The first thing I did was to create the recovery DVDs. I therefore thought that I no longer needed the recovery partition that takes up about 9GB of the hard drive (it occurs just before the C partition).

I wanted to also install Windows XP so that I could dual-boot, so I decided to start off by releasing the space taken up by the recovery partition.

I used the Paragon Partition Manager Special Edition which is supposed to be Vista compatible to examine the hard drive. It said that the recovery partition and the C partition was an "unrecognised" format. I contacted Paragon and they gave me a fix which involved changing a byte from 0x00 to 0x80 in the sector 0 of the C drive - this allowed the Paragon software to show the C drive correctly, but not the recovery partition. I thought that would be OK as I wanted to deleted the recovery partition anyway. Paragon seemed to think that Acer have some oddities in their partitioning that had confused their Partition Manager software.

So .... I told Paragon Partition Manager to delete the 9GB recovery partition and resize the C partition backwards so that it would use the 9GB that was freed-up. The software seemed to boot into a DOS-like screen briefly (probably so that it could make changes to the C partition) but the whole operation seemed to complete much too quickly, so I suspected that something had gone wrong.

Now Paragon Partition Manager shows a completely screwy list of partitions on the drive - the C and D drives are there but listed as unrecognised, there are a couple of 0 length partitions and a partition which is the size of the whole drive!!!

But, Vista boots OK and recognises the C and D drives OK!

This seemed a bit worrying, so I tried to use the recovery DVDs to get back to a factory installed state but they produce an error:

Source: D0E4T303
Dest: Harddisk0/Partition1

ERROR: 0xA000000E

so I can't use them to restore my hard drive to factory defaults.

And Paragon seem unable to help me to correct the partition info.

If I completely remove ALL partitions from my hard drive, will the recovery DVDs successfully re-partition and recover Vista?

I'd still like to try having a dual boot laptop, but until I get the partitions into a sane state I dare not try installing anything else.

I also thought about using Paragon Partition Manager to remove all existing partitions, then create only a C and D drive. Then use the recovery DVDs to see if they would just install into the new Paragon-created C drive - has anyone tried this? The hope here is that Paragon's software would have a better chance of correctly creating the extra partitions (for extra OS's) if it started with a C and D partition that it had created itself.

 

In theory, I've had good luck with removing all partitions and then using the restore DVD's (on my 8204) when the partitions aren't exactly as expected the recovery (on mine at least) seemed to go wierd and end up leaving the disk with garbage all over it.

 

i have the same problem and the same thing hapned to me. However you have Recover DVDs i didnt make any but i have an extra copy of Vista which i was able to use. I was somehow able to delete the recovery partion but after i did that my computer would not boot so i used the partition function that comes with the Vista DVD to reinstall the OS