Dell 1520 MediaDirect nightmares

Hi everyone.

I hope you can help me. I got a Dell 1520 with XP last week, and was excited about getting stuck in, but I've had quite a few problems I've had to solve, and this last one I can't figure out after searching quite a bit online, so I'm hoping someone who's more knowledgeable can help me. I'm going to try to be as comprehensive as I can, so sorry if any of this stuff's unnecessary.

I bought my laptop for music production, so the first thing I did was reinstall XP to make sure there was nothing unnecessary on the system. I decided to keep MediaDirect, so I followed the instructions on how to reinstall it (by using the MD Installation CD, then installing XP ...). I checked out if it was working properly once XP was reinstalled, and it was. The MD button loaded MediaDirect, and the power button booted XP. Ok, perfect.

But then, today ... I'm not exactly sure if it loaded when pushing the power button, or if I accidentally booted into MediaDirect with the MD button, but when booting up the laptop I went into MediaDirect unintentionally. I exited, but then when I hit the power button, it went back into MediaDirect, this time giving me the message: Dell MediaDirect Express cannot access your hard drive. This may be because you have enabled Microsoft BitLocker (Drive Encryption). MediaDirect Express is not accesssible when Microsoft Bitlocker is enabled. I eventually got the power button back to booting up XP, but this message now appears whenever I load into the MediaDirect partition.

So, something was wrong with MediaDirect, but the OS partition seemed fine. But then I tried to fix MediaDirect by using the Dell MediaDirect Repair Utility (I've since found out it was meant primarily for MD 2 ... oh well). Needless to say, the Repair Utlity didn't fix the MD partition. In fact, it's added a weird message to my XP startup - Loading PBR for Descriptor 2 ... done - which wasn't there before, although it only flashes up for a second and XP still seems to boot fine (it's annoying though that it's just started to happen). Also, after running the Repair Utlility and booting into XP, XP installs some new hardware it says it's found? Maybe this is a normal part of the MD repair process.

So that's where I am now. MediaDirect doesn't work (I just keep getting that same message), and XP seems to load ok, but now has a weird message at startup. Basically, I'd like to know what my options are. Ultimately, I'd like to fix my machine without having to reinstall XP; I just spent a week getting it how I wanted it to be. I don't care about keeping MediaDirect at this point either (the whole experience has soured me on it), so if there's some way I can just remove MediaDirect without the MD button becoming a 'self-destruct button' (what would happen if I press the MD button after reformatting the MD partition, for example? Or if I found some way to remove the MD partition right now with the machine as it is, and then run something like fixmbr on the OS partition?), that would be great. I'd also like to get the boot into my primary partition (the only one I care about keeping) as healthy as possible, without weird messages popping up all of a sudden.

Any advice/options would be appreciated!

 

i get that, but media direct always seem sto still work. it's odd

 

Hey, thanks for the reply. What do you get, the 'Cannot access hard drive' message? MediaDirect still seems to work for me if I boot it up from within XP.

 

I also had that message via the MD button after installing video codecs. What I did was I just popped the MD disc back in to install it again (to same partition, without reinstalling OS or anything). After that it worked fine since.

 

Hey Darkie. Thanks for the advice. Exactly how did you reinstall it? I'm assuming it was through Windows, but because MD's on a hidden partition I'm not sure how I should go about doing it.

 

If you need to re-install XP with or without MD check out Amber's thread. It may also be ble to tell you how to repair MD separately.

 

Yeah I just popped it in while in Vista. When you proceed it asks what partition you'd like to install it on, and the MD/hidden partition will be visible from that prompt.

 

Thanks a lot! Reinstalling MD within Windows seemed to fix one of the problems. I'm on XP though so the procedure was a little different ... I had to uninstall MD within XP and then the whole process was automatic after popping in the MD disc (it doesn't ask for the partition at all). My only problem/annoyance now is that sudden appearance of 'Loading PBR for Descriptor 2 ... done' on startup, which I read somewhere can be a sign of an unhealthy PBR. I might actually start a thread specific to this message, see if anyone knows.

Thanks again!

 

Actually, I spoke too soon. The second time I booted into MD it had the error again and messed with the MBR. I'm officially out of ideas.