MediaDirect, The Mystery Solved

Can you put Mediadirect on a brand new replacement drive?

Hermit, I used DBAN to wipe my HD. I do assure you that MediaDirect is nowhere to be found. I would be amazed if it still existed. Please tell me more!

Although this drive is short about 1.4gb????

the question is.....will it work on my 9300 When I get my M90 I think I'm going to try since i have to reinstall anyways (BTW, I do have the MediaDirect reinstal disc and the repair disc )

But this still doesn't solve the reinstall issue with it. I tried and tried to get it to work, and it never did.

Unless Dell have been ultra-ultra-sneaky, to completely remove mediadirect and recover the disk space, surely it is possible to just do a low-level format?

Binny.

it must've been a user choiceable, so there's no way to recover that lost space to that mediadirect shite?

I've been reading quite alot about MD 2.0 and getting it back up and running on my new XPS M140. From all that I have read, Dell is starting to ship its MD enabled laptops with MD installed to a protected area of the HD. The technical name for this is HPA. If you search around on the forums there is a tool provided by Hitachi that will enable you to remove this protection. If you don't then for all intents and purposes your harddrive has a capacity limit put in place that makes any program see the harddrive as 1.4gb less than its true capacity. As a result it is protected and can only be accessed by programs that know the 1.4gb sector is there, such as MD. From what I have read you can disable the HPA with the Hitachi tool, but it the protection might be reset as soon as Windows boots. Here is the link to the Hitachi tool (Its the Feature Tool 2.0): http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/suppor...tm#FeatureTool

interesting read, thank you for the link...

now the question, can i get rid of that space hogging partition ?
i only have a 40GB, and i need that 1.2GB space.

If you really want to try that, the only thing I've seen so far that might work would be deleting/overwriting the Dell boot code [A Windows reinstall will do that] followed by the Hitachi utility. I don't think there as any 'for sure' guidance on using the Hitachi utility on non-Hitachi drives. So you're on your own there.....

Mark

I am actually attempting to remove the HPA protection as well. So far I have been having a bit of trouble. When I maximize the accessible drive range, using the Hitachi Feature Tool, my windows installation disk cannot format the unallocated space. It is able to create partitions, but when I attempt to install to one of them, and consequently format it, the setup asks me for confirmation to format by pressing "f". I have never before seen this screen in the windows setup process. Right now I have download another tool from the Hitachi webpage I posted earlier. I used Feature tool to expand capacity of the drive to the manufacturer settings, used Drive Fitness Test to erase the bootsector and now I am doing a low level reformat. The reason I have decided to do all of this is because I originally wanted to reformat my XPS M140. I want to use a nLite modified version of the original Dell supplied Windows XP MCE OS. I also wanted a small (15GB) partition for the OS and programs, and a second partition (using the remaining HD space) for all of my data (music, movies, etc.). I was able to successfully do this and have Media Direct 2.0 work almost perfectly. Unfortunately I wasn't happy because after loading MD, Windows would not boot properly, hanging just before the logon screen. I was able to restart the machine and get into Windows, but was not satisfied with this. It is quite possible that this was related to using a modified Windows OS, so if anyone wants instructions on how I got this too work let me know and I'll post what I did. In the end I have decided to abolish the HPA sector, if possible, reclaim the space and just use the MD keys to control Windows Media Center through Dell Quickset. I'll provide an update when I make some headway.

If it was a 'hang' during the display of the www.dell.com 'blue bar' screen, then it was probably due to a conflict between the partition table and the boot code. Also if you did a 'Reinstall' instead of MediaDirect 'Repair, that would contribute to problems as well... Something that probably could be fixed, but I think you're well beyond that now....

What hard drive are you using btw....

Mark

Mark,

The issue I was having earlier with hanging occurred after the Windows XP logo screen, at the logon screen, but before the logon prompt came up. I attribute it to trying to using MD2 and a modified Windows MCE OS installation DVD. To get to that point where both MD2 and my modified Windows MCE OS worked, I had previously used MD Repair in conjunction with the Windows OS Setup. Unfortunately this didn't work absolutely the way I wanted. Instead using MD2 caused the subsequent hang in Windows following a reboot. I was able to just restart and then could successfully boot and log into Windows. In attempting to fix this hang I had played around with the MD Reinstallation ISO located somewhere on this forum, but it would hang at 10% upon install. From what I have read this is because the MD Reinstallation CD is for Laptop without the HPA sector. You would use the CD to reinstall MD2 to an unallocated part of the HD (from what I've read approx. 1500 mb). I probably could have gotten this to work, but I allocated all of the visible space of the HD (not the HPA though because I couldn't see it). I think when messing with the Hitachi Feature tool and maximizing the visible capacity of my drive and then using Windows OS Setup to erase the visible partitions is when I broke the HPA. Unfortunately it didn't make it completely visible. So now like I said I have resorted to the Hitachi Fitness Test utility (after again maximizing the visible capacity with Feature Tool) to erase the MBR and also do a low level format. Unfortunately the low level format is crawling. It is about 25% done after nearly 2.5 hours. I was tempted to restart it hoping it was running slow as a result of a fluke, but have decided to wait it out rather than risk tacking on more time.

I am using the Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 model: HTS541080G9AT00

Sure hope it works after all of that....

Good Luck

Mark