Problem with Starting Vista Complete Backup

[Guest]

After clean installation of Vista Ultimate, I got the error 0x80070001 when I
tried starting a complete PC backup. The error message showed up while
looking for and failing to find a suitable backup drive. I have a USB 200 GB
external drive recognized by the Vista program that backs up files.

I saw some discussion in a 9-month-old post about this problem occurring if
you have a disk partition marked as Active EISA. When I set up Vista, I
installed to a new 160 GB hard disk, Disk #1, and boot from that. I formatted
the old 80 MB disk, Disk #0, as NTFS as a second data disk, but the format
left an "orphan" 39 MB partition marked as Active EISA. I went into Disk
Manager but found no obvious way of deleting this "orphan". Right now, I have
nothing on that drive. No other partition is marked as Active. Any
suggestions?

I'd like some way of getting rid of this orphan partition. If doing so
requires reformatting the drive, that's okay since I have no data on it
(now). If that isn't feasible, could I just go into device manager and
disable the drive?

 

[Guest]

In Vista's Disk Manager - mark your system drive/partition as active. Then
reboot - you'll get an error (cannot find bootmgr) - Boot from your Vista DVD
and run repair. Boot from your Vista DVD again and select the recovered Vista
Installation (with recovered after it) and then select repair Startup -
reboot and all will be fine! I have just done this on my Dell Vista Ultimate
x64 machine so I could run the Complete Backup.