Can't remove MediaDirect 3?

I am trying to totally remove MediaDirect 3 from my laptop, and I can't seem to get it all the way off.

First, I press the MediaDirect button while the laptop is powered off to boot into the MediaDirect partition. This makes the "hidden" MediaDirect partition visible to my disk manager program - so I can delete it.

Next, I deleted all the visible partitions (System, MediaDirect 3, and Utility partitions). At this point my hard drive seems to be fully "Unallocated". Note: I think that my hard drive size at this point appears smaller than I think it should be: The disk management software reports 91.75 GB for my 100 GB Toshiba drive. I may be wrong about whether it is too small, though.

Then, I reinstall WinXP without anything else. This goes fine.

However, here's where my problem crops up: If I press the MediaDirect button when the PC is shut down, MediaDirect actually starts to boot up, and then reinstalls itself onto a hard drive partition. I thought I totally deleted MediaDirect 3 from my hard drive, but apparently a backup image is stored somewhere on the PC (In a ultra-super-hidden partition? Or, Flash Memory? Or, some subspace wormhole?!?!)

Does anybody know what is going on?

Thanks ...

AzJazz

 

I think that there may be another hidden partition on your HDD and your allocated disk space supports this. Use the formula (1000/1048)*x where x=manufacturer reported HDD size (in your case 100gb). Using this formula you should have about 95gb free.

Now for that hidden partition: I have used this (link) program on my wife's laptop to open up the hidden partition so I could pull the driver files off, and it may work for you too... but instead of revealing the drive to pull files off you can go ahead and delete it.

Of course you know that if you delete this you will never get this data back, and you may want to create a backup of the partition "just in case".

 

TabbedOut - It looks like I would need to boot Linux to use this, correct?

I don't currently have Linux installed, but I can try booting Knoppix to see if it makes the all the partitions visible.

The disk partitioning software that I use is Acronis (Awesome products!) Disk Director Suite, which is Linux based - and it doesn't show any other partitions right now.

I'm wondering if the mystery partition is being hidden by the BIOS, which might prevent any software from getting to it - Linux or otherwise ...

 

Try downloading the live gparted cd and boot from that. It may work, and you have little to lose.

 

OK - It took a few days, but I finally tried the gparted Live CD as well as a few other disk partitioning tools.

Acronis Disk Director seemed to give the most information, though the results were effectively the same for all the tools. The all showed the same 4 partitions.

I basically have these 4 partitions on my hard drive:

• FAT16: 47.03 MB FAT16 partition, code 0xDE (Dell Utility)
• WinXP: 88.7 GB NTFS partition (Windows OS)
• MEDIADIRECT: 3.003 GB partition, code: 0xDD (MediaDirect 3)
• Unallocated: 7.844 MB partititon

I can't see any other hidden partitions that could be holding a backup image of MediaDirect.

All I can figure is that an image of MediaDirect must get stored in flash that gets reloaded on the first boot-up, but it seems like that would take up a LOT of Flash. The MEDIADIRECT partition has 1 GB of space used up.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can really get rif of MD3?