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    Dell Media Direct button fixes MBR?

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by Nalada, Apr 27, 2010.

  1. Nalada

    Nalada Notebook Evangelist

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    The other day our M1330 with SSD presented with a boot problem.
    It was stating "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restart".
    I could not even get into BIOS at boot with F2 unless I removed the power cord and battery for a moment.
    The boot still prompted for 'hard' disk password so I presumed the SSD was alive but the boot records corrupted. I then had the bright idea of pressing the Home key. This must have rewritten the MBR as it then booted normally and has been fine since. So at least that is some use for this feature.

    (When it does boot, the Media Direct is running in a window inside Windows Vista - so I guess this is not exactly how it is supposed to boot - but I don't use DMD anyway... just needed the fix to get Vista running again... and it was a lot easier than digging out recovery disks and trying to correct the MBR.)