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Can you reroute the mediadirect and media buttons to be used for other applications?

post #1 of 13
6/30/06 at 2:24pm
Thread Starter 
Well, I'm on my brand new e1505 and I'm loving it so far. I did a complete reformat yesterday, and since mediadirect was a useless ugly piece of crap I deleted the partition it was on and won't bother getting it back. However, this means that there is now a useless button on my notebook.

So my question is, does anyone know of a way to get that mediadirect button to open up a different program, say for example windows media player or winamp? This should all be possible since it's all software based, but I just dont know if there are any hacks to do this or if there are any ways to do this through windows.

Also, I was wondering if anyone knew how to make the media buttons at the front of the laptop work with other applications aside from windows media player. I'd like them to be able to work with winamp since I use winamp much much more than windows media player for listening to music. There should be a way to do this, but so far I haven't figured out how to do it or if it is possible at all without a hack or utility. Anyone have any suggestions?

thanks for the help everyone!
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post #2 of 13
6/30/06 at 3:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by L7frost
Well, I'm on my brand new e1505 and I'm loving it so far. I did a complete reformat yesterday, and since mediadirect was a useless ugly piece of crap I deleted the partition it was on and won't bother getting it back.
I didn't realize there was any way to access the HPA portion of the drive and reclaim the 1.5 GB of space dedicated to MediaDirect. What did you use to remove it?
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post #3 of 13
6/30/06 at 6:41pm
Thread Starter 
When you do a reformat using the XP discs that Dell sends you ( if you ask for them ), you can delete the partitions and make your own. There's an excellent guide for doing all this over at notebookreview.com on their forums.
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post #4 of 13
6/30/06 at 11:06pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prosaic
I didn't realize there was any way to access the HPA portion of the drive and reclaim the 1.5 GB of space dedicated to MediaDirect. What did you use to remove it?

It takes a special utility to access, or rather allow access to the HPA. The XP reinstall and format does NOT get rid of the partition since it can't even see it. Partition magic, at least my older version, can not even see it. I finally found, through research and a lucky google, this neat utility made by Hitachi called "Feature Tool (v2.01)". It's about half way down the page.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

I downloaded it and made a bootable floppy and it worked great even though I don't even have a Hitachi drive. It lets you change the reported drive size to the maximum amount, allowing the BIOS, and in turn your OS to see that full drive space. With the 100gb 7200 rpm (Seagate?) drive it showed 98.5 gb reported, and I can change it up to 100 gb.
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post #5 of 13
7/1/06 at 12:10am
That's what I thought. A lot of people think they've deleted MediaDirect because they got rid of all the partitions they could see, but it's still sitting hidden on their disk beyond the reported size of the drive.

Once when I ran a partition utility after running MediaDirect I was able to see the location of MediaDirect as the fourth primary partition. But it's location was just beyond the end of the drive and I was unable to access it because of its "illegal" location. Actually it screwed up an installation of Solaris 10 I was doing on my laptop. Solaris decided my partition table was illegal because it referenced those out of bounds cylinders.

It sounds like with that Hitachi tool you could actually access the MediaDirect area and do a proper backup of it or just delete it and use the space.
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post #6 of 13
7/1/06 at 12:16am
I just completed my backup of about 60 gb on a secondary drive just in case something goes wrong and I have to do a full reinstall. I will first change the size using the tool, if it leaves the empty space unpartitioned I will try to merge it with my main partition using partition magic, but if that does not work I guess I'll need to do a full reinstall just to gain that 1.5gb. It is worth it since I have never watched a movie on a laptop and with only 100gb and this being my main pc every bit of space counts. I have about 14gb free now, so that's an extra 10% free space for free
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post #7 of 13
7/1/06 at 12:16am
To make your buttons on the front work with Winamp then you have to change the setting in Winamp. File>Options>Preferences>Global Hotkeys> then you have to enable them. Easy as pie. I realized that Winamp over powers the other media players that I've used, so if you have them both opened then it the controls run winamp verses the others. And about the Media Direct button, I was wondering if I could put Windows Vista, and XP, or just linux or something on my E1505 and have the power button for one OS and the Media Direct button for the other.. Anyone have any clue if that would be possible?
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post #8 of 13
7/1/06 at 3:08am
Just an update. It worked.

First I ran the utility I listed above, then changed the max size to the 100.03 gb it showed. There are two options, permanent save and temporary save (only until power down). Permanent would not work so I had to choose the temporary option.

Second I rebooted (do not shutdown or settings may be lost) and then booted off floppy, ran partition magic, blew away my C partition leaving the full drive capacity open. Realize you will lose the contents of your drive and have to reinstall doing it this way.

Three, just reinstall everything like you had it before you started When XP installs and it will format the drive for the new maximum amount.

Worked like a charm, but was a lot of trouble for about 1.5 gb of space. Windows showed 98.5 gb space before and now shows 100 gb. I wanted to just resize the main partition but my version of partition magic would not allow it on this drive for whatever reason.
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post #9 of 13
7/1/06 at 12:03pm
If you haven't permanently changed the size of the drive as reported to BIOS I'd worry about what happens when you try to use that last 1.5 GB of space. You have a partition table that says your partition goes all the way up to the 100 GB mark, but the size of your drive is listed as 98.5 GB. Which figure will XP pay attention to when it comes time to write data up there?
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post #10 of 13
7/1/06 at 12:12pm
I can easily test this and report back. I will just copy a dvd image a few times until the drive is almost full and see what happens. I figured the "temporary" part would not be a problem once I got the drive partitioned and formatted as the max size.
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post #11 of 13
7/1/06 at 4:12pm
Here an update for anybody interested in getting that 1.5 gb back.

The procedure I used above totally works.

I Filled the drive to capacity (68mb free out of 100 gb) and all was well except windows telling me drive space was low (no crap )

No errors when running disk scan, defrag, or shutdown and cold boot. The BIOS reports 100gb now too, and before it reported 98.5 gb.
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post #12 of 13
7/1/06 at 5:12pm
Sounds good. You managed to defeat the Media Direct HPA!

I'll probably hang on to mine. MediaDirect isn't all that usefull, but it's an amusing stupid trick my laptop can do.
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post #13 of 13
7/4/06 at 4:32am
Thread Starter 
Syndrome, thanks for the winamp tip! Easiest thing I've ever done hahaha. In fact, I feel like a complete moron for trying everything but that!

thanks again!
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