I fixed my MediaDirect 2.0 button.....herre's how.

Ok, I have a 3 day old E1705 (shipped to me Feb 21), so maybe they are doing something different with the partitions than what I have read previously. I wanted to reformat as everyone here swears up and down about it. When I was confused about what to do, there 50 different answers and everyones experience has varied.

My E1705 Shipped with 3 partitions: 80 GB HD 7200 RPM

1. 47 MB Dell Utilities
8 mb filler
2. 70 GB OS C:
8mb filler
3. 5GB Mystery F:

Well I decided the mystery F was most likely either the Media Direct, which I thought was supposed to be a 1308MB partition or Dell ghost image....either way I wanted the space and deleted all partitions but the #1. "Utilities". I then did a fresh full reformat and reinstalled the OS.

After installing the drivers, etc starting with the chipset.....my PC was good as new and really running nice. My Mediadirect however did not work. After reading all night through 1000 posts I decided to give the media repair cd a try which I downloaded here and burned my own image of.

http://support.dell.com/support/down...&fileid=148039

I restarted and booted to CD, followed the instructions by changing directory in dos and typing repair.....a second later it said done! Way too easy I thought, and I had read some people found this utility to mess up xp, oh well I was prepared to reformat again if I had to.......restarted, OS said it found new hardware...and installed it....weird. Did full shutdown, tried media direct buttonand boom it worked, went to settings and let me configure.

To make a long story short it appears they are now hiding the Media Direct Partition, it was not an option for me to delete it in XP setup, which is good. So you really cannot mess things up by reformatting and even deleting the dell ghost partition.

Everything is good to go and I am happy.

Hope this helps someone with similar situation.

Cool, glad it helped. Why Dell doesnt make the info public baffles me.....

It should still work, the media direct app is sepererate.

It exists if you want a restore partition to put your PC back to the way it was when you got it in case something goes wrong with a virus, or you accidentily delete needed software. Most savvy users won't need this....

I was wondering the same thing?? You were surprised the info is now gone???

Currently there is no link I know of to download Media Direct 2.0, the links on Dells site are for the previous version. Unless it is available on a torrent site you will have to wait until Dell updates the file section for the E-1705 or request that CD from Dell.