Couple of things I learned about MD3

I have spent hours over the last few days trial and erroring my way around MD3 to find out how to make it work best for me.

The correct process to install MD3 is:

Start by booting to the MD3 disc and choose 1 or 2 parittions as suites your needs (note this will wipe out any data on your system, so back it all up first!). Then reboot and install windows as normal, once in windows run dellkit.exe off the MD3 disc to complete the setup. This is all detailed in your documention that came with your system.

First off if you only want to use 1 or 2 basic paritions you shouldn't have many problems with MD3. MD3 seems to run into problems if you have any extended parititions (which you will probably only run into if you are making a lot of partitions).

MD3 does not seem to have any problems with Logical partitions or with rearranging, andding or resizing parittions after MD3 is setup and running.

MD3s custom partition size seems to range from 2-3 GB. I am not sure exactly what it depends on what sizes it choose however I have seen it show up as 2, 2.5 and 3 GB during different installs. I think there may be more than 1 version of the install disc (I have 3 MD3 install discs that all say Rev00 but have different part numberes).

MD3 must be setup before installing windows by booting the MD3 disc. It will walk you through the setup steps and create a hidden special parittion for MD3 to be installed on later. It may also create a custom MBR to help with booting MD3, not sure on that one.

You MAY be able to create the partition yourself if you didn't boot with the MD3 disc before installing windows using an advanced utility like Acronis Disk Director however it would probably involve some tinkering with advanced properties to get it right. In general though you MD3 doesn't support being installed after Windows if you didn't setup using the MD CD first.

You can reinstall/reformat non MD3 partitions after setting up MD3 the first time, but make sure to reinstall the windows portion of MD3 again or you will get a bitlocker error when trying to run the MD3 parittion direct boot.

MD3 seems to have problems with extended partitions. As mentioned above it will probably only effect you if you are making lots of partitions, stick to only primary and logical parittions and you should be ok. So far I can confirm it seems to have no problems with 1 primary and 3 logical, 2 primary and 2 logical and 2 primary and 1 logical invisible partition.

If you want to do anything advanced with MD3 (like add custom codecs) you can use the method mentioned in the thread on this forum for that purpose or you can use Acronis Disk Director sweet to edit the hidden MD3 parititon and rename the taskmgr.ex_ file.

If you do that you will have to force the MD3 parittion not to boot from the hybernation file to show the effects of making the change, you dont' have to delete or rename files for this, rather when booting to the MD3 paritition just press F8 and choose to delete restoration file and boot clean (not exact term) and it will take care of finding the taskmgr.exe and letting you ctrl shft esc.

I did not have luck backing up and restoring the MD3 partition using Acronis True Image. While the partition would restore it would simply hang at the MD boot splash screen. NOTE I only tried restoring the partition after something else had broken it (usually trying to boot after creating an etended partition).

Currently my setup is:

C: Primary OS Partition
D: Logical Data parititon
S: Hidden Logical Swap file partition
X: Logical backup partition (holds my Acronis Image of the clean build)

This was done by using MD3 boot to create 2 partitions (by default MD3 will create 1 primary and then one logical partition if you choose the 2 parittion option) installing windows, then using disk director customize and create the rest of the partitions.

Hope this clears up some potential shortfalls for anyone else!

 

Do you know if u can install MD3 to a hdd with one large partition?
I wanna make a 3gb FAT32 partition in windows and install MD3 there but when i run it in windows it says harddrive hasnt been prepared.
No go?

 

Dude you are actually confusing extended partitions and logical partitions.... There can only be two types of partition in the main partition table - PRIMARY and EXTENDED and that too only one EXTENDED.... Also the main partiton table can hold only 4 partition entries.... To overcome this limitation the EXTENDED partition actually acts as a container for holding a number of logical partitions.... So logical partitions can only be created inside an EXTENDED partition and cannot be created separately....

But one thing which I'm still not sure of (since I didnt yet get to see my laptop) is that whether MD3 partition is the only logical partition in the last extended partition of the partition table....

 

While it may be possible to recreate the partition for MD3 after installing windows it's more complicated than just cranking out a regular partition.

Acronis lists this partitoin as:

FAT32 Partition: 0xDD (Hidden CTOS memdump)
FAT32

If the MD3 disc actually changes some setting (MBR or whatnot) other than just creating the partition then you would have to do that also.

Good luck if you want to try it out, I would love to be able to fox my MD3 if it breaks after reinstalling windows.

 

It certainly seems to defy partition rules but when I look at my parititon table in both Acronis and Windows Disk Management it shows 1 Active Primary partition and 2 Logical partitions. If I shrink one of the logical partitions then choose to reuse that space the new space is labled extended.

Who knows why... you are correct in your explanation of partition pneumenclature but I can tell you empiracally that this is how it shows up.

In any case, what Vista reports as an extended partition is what screws up MD3...

And if we assume disk management and acronis are reporting things backwards, then by default the MD3 dir is indeed the only logical parition in the last extended partition.

Here is a screenshot that might help both of you out

 

Okay then from the figure you have attached I can confirm one thing for sure.... You have 2 primary ( 47 mb and C: ) and one extended partition (remaining space including mediadirect partition).... And in the extended partition you have 3 logical partitions (D:, 4 gb hidden partition, 2 gb md partition)....

Can you post a pic of Vista Disk Management how it shows ?