Cant delete partitions on my new Dell laptop

I would not recommend making any partitioning changes while caching is enabled on the mSATA drive. I've seen data corruption result from this. Can you check if it's enabled (Intel SRT or equivilent) and disable it? You should be able to enable after the changes, but it will probably only work for one system.

What you describe sounds like the cache is out of sync with the drive. For example, the changes got made to the hard drive and the mSATA wasn't updated. When you boot the computer the cache is used with all the old data.

The DD CD version may not handle the SRT setup correctly (haven't tried it).

Hopefully, you have a current backup of the system.

Thanks! Disabling Intel SRT did the trick. However, after restoring the TI backup to the 3 primary partitions and installing OSS, OSS finds no Operating Systems. Disabling OSS and booting up to active unhidden partion (the other two or not active and hidden ) did not work. Trying a windows repair with the OEM Windows DVD did not work either. The first time I ran the repair, no Operating Systems were found. Second time it found them but could not fix the issue and got a BOOTMGR is missing message. I also tried the steps in this guide with no luck.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/win7-windows-7-mbr,10036.html

I have deleted all the partitions and recreated them again. This time when I restore the TI backup, I will not restore the MBR, just the "c" drive. I will repeat this for each primary partition and then install OSS and see what happens.

I managed to get the laptop to boot to windows, but would get a blue screen a few seconds after "Starting Windows" would appear followed by a reboot. Tried the Windows repair and that did not help.

I deleted all the partitions on the 750 gig drive and did a sector by sector restore of the TI full backup (The backup I was using above was just the "c drive" ). Even after this full backup the boot to windows would result in the blue screen followed by a reboot.

I enabled Intel SRT again and while booting, a consistency check had to be performed. After this was done, I was able to logon to Windows but there were problems with the desktop. I rebooted the laptop and can no longer logon as I get a user profile error. Looks like I need to re-install Windows from scratch (with Intel SRT disdabled)....

You're probably running into a problem with the storage drivers. SRT uses a "fake" RAID 0 setup. When you disable it the controller should be in AHCI mode. If you enabled RAID mode on the controller it would probably boot into Windows (you don't have to configure any drives as RAID). However, if you're not using RAID and want a clean system I would recommend just doing a reinstall with it setup how you want. Even if you got it booting okay the way it is now and everything seemed okay I would guess it would only be a short period of time before it falls apart.

I tried SRT a while back and found it way too easy to corrupt and it was not imaging friendly. The way they configure it is just asking for problems, in my opinion. Much better to just install to the mSATA drive or a standard SSD and use the standard drive for data.

When I disabled SRT in the BIOS, I selected AHCI mode. I also saw that you can disable SRT within windows. Maybe I should have disabled it first in Windows, reboot and disable SRT in the BIOS and then take a TI backup (The TI backup I have been using has SRT enabled in Windows)? As far as I know, I am not using RAID as I only have 1 disk.