Media Direct, Partitioning

Assuming Dell is standard with MediaDirect and it's the same on the 6400 as my M1210, the partition is hidden and can't be seen from within Disk Management. If you delete the MediaDirect partition but install or leave Dell's Media Experience within Windows, then the button will use that. However, you won't be able to use Media Direct without first booting to Windows. There's a good explanation of the way it works at http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm.

If you want to be able to use Media Direct without first booting to Windows, then I suggest you leave the hidden partition the way it is. If you don't care about booting to Windows and want to recover some space, then find the Hitachi Feature Tool. Google it and also do a search on Feature Tool in these forums. You can use the feature tool to set the drive capacity to the proper maximum and then you'll have access to the MediaDirect partition. I was surprised to find that doing this did not require an immediate reload of Windows. However, making the hidden partition "visible" does not make it usable from Windows. However you can reformat it. One thing. Once you've set the maximum in the feature tool, reboot without shutting down or you lose the change.

On my M1210, I installed Roxio Easy Creator and it uninstalled Dell's Media Experience and installed the equivalent. I guess Dell licensed from Roxio. In any case, once I've booted to Windows, pressing the MediaDirect buton brings up Roxio's version.

So to summarize, yes you can do what you want to do.

As for the Restore partition, it's only needed if you want to be able to restore to what Dell sent you. Personally, I ghosted the various partitions just in case but I don't really need them. I kept the Utility/Diagnostic partition, merged the hidden partition with the rest of the space and reloaded Windows and everything else I wanted.

Hope this helps

Bob

Sorry if there was confusion. It's always tricky posting suggestions based on a different machine.

Dell's Media Experience is the software side of MediaDirect. On my M1210, you can press the MediaDirect button with the machine off and you do a fast boot and are able to play CDs and DVDs using hard buttons on the front of the machine. That uses the hidden MediaDirect partition (HPA-based). However, the software behind MediaDirect is Media Experience, at least on my machine. When I was preparing to re-install, I phoned Dell and had them send me a CD with the latest version. You may already have that. In any case, if I press the MediaDirect button once I'm already booted, it launches Media Experience, which looks the same as MediaDirect.

I suggest leaving the Diagnostic partition. It's only 60meg or so. Sure you can run the same thing from CD but if you can't find the CD it's handy. The restore partition is pretty useless unless you want to restore to the original received condition.

The capacity setting on the feature tool is the perceived capacity by the OS and is based on the way hard drive manufacturers calculate capaity. Why I don't know, but Western Digital was sued over the difference (and the lawyers won big). Hard drive manufacturers calculate a Gig as a number of billion bytes, whereas the OS sees a Gig as 1024*1024*1024 bytes. So a 120Gig drive (from the hard drive vendor) is seen as 111.8Gig by the OS (divide 120,000,000,000 by (1024*1204*1024)).

When I was re-installing everything, I first made the hidden (on my machine) MediaDirect partition visible. Then, when I re-installed Windows, I left the diagnostic partition alone, but split the original C to what I wanted for a system/Windows partition (20Gig). Then once Windows was installed, I used the Disk manager to merge the remaining space and then split it into the logical partitions I wanted. At least i think that was the sequence. I may have merged the previously hidden partition with the restore partition first.

Bob

dell no longer uses the hidden hpa partition media direct 3 formats a 2 gig partition and a 47 meg partition with dell diags. Media direct 3 also runs in windows xp pro mot media experience when you push the m/d button the media direct software is located on the m/d dvd its just basically a newer version of cineplayer with office support
jim