Assign Media Direct button to load Media Center

Any way to do this? I uninstalled Media Direct from Windows after cloning my hard drive since I only copied over the Diagnostics and OS partitions. When I press the Media Direct button from within Windows now I get the error "Unable to launch Dell MediaDirect. Please install this software and try again.". There must be a way since some people have it set to do this.

 

Can't anyone help me with this?

*bump*
I know it has been less than 24 hours but it was buried on the 3rd page...

EDIT: I just found out that you can install just the Windows portion of Media Direct simply by running the installer on the CD manually. This file is located at x:\WindowsMD3\Setup.exe where x is the letter of the drive where the cd is at. I had to do this since I never prepared the drive for MediaDirect but rather just copied the install and diagnostic partitions from the old drive to the new one then expanded the install partition. This added about 130GB for additional storage.

I'm going to see if I can exploit this and see what it is running right now...

 

Ok. This deserves a new reply post. I just resolved my own question but right now it requires a registry edit. On my searching I had found the DMX program but it did not work for me as it is designed for machines that were using Dell Media Experience (mine was not) therefore it was looking at the wrong registry keys. I ran regmon (system internals application) and it came up with this:

Code:

quickset.exe:848	QueryValue	HKLM\SOFTWARE\Dell\Media Direct\PathName	SUCCESS	"C:\Program Files\Dell\MediaDirect\MDirect.exe"	

Yep. Different registry location for MD3. I changed the PathName value to something else. As an experiment I changed it to the location for solitare and it worked . Now I am going to uninstall the Media Direct application (don't need it installed) and see if I can get it to work without it being there.

Ok. If you want to use the DMX program then just do this...

1. Apply the DMX_Patch.reg file. I also have a MediaDirect_Restore.reg file attached too that will revert the change.

2. Download the DMX program from this thread and unzip it to C:\Program Files\Dell\DMX\. If you want a different location you will need to modify DMX_Patch.reg to point to a different location and then re-apply it.

3. Run DME Launcher.exe and point it to any program you want!

What the patch does...

The patch modifies the PathName value in the registry for QuickSet so that it calls a different program than it was originally supposed to do. This registry value is a String type and is queried by QuickSet immediately after you press that button.

 

Can you boot directly to Media Direct now? Or is this only for using Media Direct within Windows?

 

This is only from within Windows. I didn't want Media Direct on my computer but wanted to use that button from within Windows for other things. Right now I used the supplied registry patch and the DMX utility I linked to in order to get that button to load Media Center instead. I found that you can safely uninstall Media Direct and it will continue to function fine. The error comes up if it can't find the file that the PathName registry key references.

BTW, There are instructions in the forums for how to get the Media Direct button to boot a different OS. Also I never copied over the Media Direct partition when I copied my installation over to a new drive. The question comes now is to what will happen when I use the button to boot the computer...