Dell Media Direct 3.0 Partitions?

I seem to have screwed up my media direct (v3.0) installation by faffing around with the partitions. I press the media direct button and it goes throuhg the splash screens and loading onto the Clock timer and crashes to a blue screen.

It was working ok (I ran it up once and it performed all the configuration and worked fine), but since then I have installed XP directly from the installation CD (which was fine) but I wanted to revert back and did a manual restore of the dell image (as I didnt think Ctrl-F11 was working, but it is.), during this process I re-configured partitions 3 and 4 (as I thought the restore image was on 3 but it was on 4).

Mine still has 4 Partitions as follows
1) Dell Utility Partition (~100mb Type DE)
2) Operating System (~98gb Type 07)
3) Media Direct Partion? (~2gb unknown type)
4) Dell restore partition (~4gb Type DB)

If anyone knows or can find the time to run up a partition viewer (ptedit using a boot disk or similar windows tool), please check what your partition types are for 3 and 4. Also any other suggestions on how to fix are appreciated, I tried f8 during media direct boot but just get the standard XP bootup options and safe mode doesnt work either.

Everything else still works fine on the laptop, including the dell automated recovery process and hardware diagnostics, and media direct from within XP itself. I would like to run the dell media direct CD boot up sequence to reformat, but am concerned that by doing this I will either end up with even more partitions and possibly lose the dell recovery partition so only want to do this as a last resort.

I believe Media Direct v2.0 works differently so is not applicable so this is only relevant to new dell machines.

 

Would I be right in saying if I set the partition 3 to fat32 and format the dell media direct cd will allow me to re-install it?

Or does it require additional preparation by the cd boot prodecure?

 

Unfortunately it is not really a FAT32 partition if I recall correctly. It is a logical drive with a partition inside itself the same size. Windows Disk Management shows it to be a normal primary partition, but that is just because it does not know how to deal with it. If you view it in Partition Magic or a similar program, you see what I described above.

You would either need to repair the installation by just reinstalling MD from within Windows, and if that doesn't work, let the MD reformat the drive and start over.

MD2 had a repair utility you could boot to fix booting errors, but I am not sure about MD3. Might be worth it to try, but if you tell it to "Start Installation" it will clear the drive.

 

Will i loose the dell utilitys and restore when MD reformats the partitions?

 

From what I recall, yes to restore, no to utilities. I may be wrong though.

 

Ah, ok I will try and backup the restore partition using the ghost tools and save both the image and the files to disk.

 

Good idea. if you have the space, I would do a total ghost since you can extract individual partitions from that if need be.

 

It basically worked, I have got media direct working again, but I have lost the ability to Ctrl-F11 to restore on boot up (even though I have been able to fully recover the dell restore partition onto the logical D: drive set up by the Media Direct install procedure).

This is not a particularly big problem, as a manual restore can easily be done by using a boot up disk and then restoring from DOS if you know how to use the Ghost tools (but you dont go back to the EULA anymore).

I think its a bit of an oversight that the dell restore procedure wont restore a corrupt media direct partition, especially now that with MD3.0 it uses Windows XP as its shell as is therefore quite possibly going to get corrupted from time to time.

 

Masami, what "basically worked"? Reinstalling MD3, or using Dell's MD Repair Utility?

I don't know how MD3 works, but if it boots through XP as you say, then that probably means it doesn't use custom MBR code. If your MD is booting properly again, would you mind sending me a Dsrfix dumpfile to study? I'm curious to see whether it's a generic XP MBR or if it's customized.


Dan Goodell