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Using Ghost to duplicate an M1210 disk

post #1 of 8
6/22/06 at 4:03pm
Thread Starter 
Have an M1210 (very happy with it), just went to ghost the HD, did a full Disk to Disk... but it would appear that the MediaDirect partition was left behind.

I booted to DOS and ran the normal DOS Ghost program. I've never seen it not copy a whole disk when it said it would.

At the moment if I press the MediaDirect button it launches the normal WindowsXP and loads the app inside of my normal windows session, which cracks me up for some reason.
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post #2 of 8
6/22/06 at 5:04pm
I did a Ghost 10.0 restore on a 1405 a couple days ago it was for the main partition only as well (as I expected).
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post #3 of 8
6/22/06 at 6:48pm
MediaDirect is hidden in an HPA region of the Dell drive, it's not a standard partition. It's difficult, if not impossible, to get at that space. Apparently even ghost doesn't see it. You'll have to set aside an unused 1.5 GB on your new drive and find a cory of the MediaDirect reinstallation disk if you want it on your new drive (the reinstallation will create a hidden partition, instead of an HPA).
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post #4 of 8
6/22/06 at 8:20pm
Does that mean I can reinstall Media Direct on my M1210? I'm using the drive that came with the system, but I reformatted and reinstalled Windows myself. I removed all visible partitions before installing Windows, but if you say the Mediadirect partition is hidden and fairly inaccessible, does that mean I can restore Mediadirect should I choose to, without messing my XP installation?

Thanks.
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post #5 of 8
6/22/06 at 9:11pm
You just need to download the Media Direct repair utility from the Dell support web site, burn the .iso file onto a CD. Boot up your laptop with the CD & run that & it will repair the Media Direct function on your system. Note that the repair utility is to be used only on the Harddisk that can with your system & not a new one. Good luck.
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post #6 of 8
6/22/06 at 9:54pm
Thread Starter 
Yeah, the disk that came with the laptop works fine, but I need to be using the new disk.

I ran the MD repair util from Dell before posting and it doesn't help -- in fact, if you run the contents of the batchfile without > nul it shows you that it can't find the software/partition.

I'm going to reghost the drive and leave a 1.5GB area free then try the utils to install MD from the files listede elsewhere in the forum, will post the results.
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post #7 of 8
6/23/06 at 2:18am
Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamG
I'm using the drive that came with the system, but I reformatted and reinstalled Windows myself. I removed all visible partitions before installing Windows, but if you say the Mediadirect partition is hidden and fairly inaccessible, does that mean I can restore Mediadirect should I choose to, without messing my XP installation?
Since you deleted all the partitions, it won't be that easy. Yes, MediaDirect is almost certainly still hiding in a 1.5 GB HPA on your drive, but the repair disk probably won't work. MediaDirect repair seems to also require the small 40 MB Dell utility partition at the beginning of the drive. If you leave that alone the repair works fine. You might be able to get MediaDirect working again, but it will probably require some repartitioning. I think you need to recreate a small first partition and make windows the second primary partition. Whether you want to go that far to get MediaDirect working again is your call.
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post #8 of 8
6/23/06 at 7:00am
See here for re-install: http://www.notebookforums.com/thread156158.html
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