Help! Messed up bootloader on XPS M1530!!

help, please!

my dell XPS M1530 had a mediadirect/vista/ubuntu setup that was working like a charm until a couple of days ago the C: (vista) partition got infected with a nasty trojan that managed to override my mcafee enterprise antivirus. I tried several tools to remove it, with no success. Since at that point I was afraid it’d infect the bios, I decided to boot from the vista CD and fresh reinstall on C:. I thought this was going to leave everything else untouched: WRONG! After the reinstall, the system was loading vista directly instead of the bootloader prompt.

That’s where I’ve screwed up really badly: I booted from the mediadirect button to check whether my partition table was screwed up. And guess what I got? Yep, the blue screen of death.

I know that some of you guys are going “DUH” at this point, but this is my first dell laptop and the first time I had to deal with this mediadirect s**t.

So now windows won’t boot. If I boot from the vista CD I see:
C:\ mediadirect
D:\ data
E:\ Windows
X:\ (cant remember what it was labeled)
Basically when I pushed the stupid button, mediadirect created a C: partition and kicked windows into E:

on top of that, my moron roommate let me know that my data backups are 'mysteriously' messed up after he borrowed my external HD. So now the only backups I have are like in 100 different places. It would take me days to rebuild all the folders and stuff…

the way I see it, I have two options:

either:
(1) I manage to recover vista long enough to get me through finals; I know I need to reinstall everything from scratch eventually, but at least I have enough time to figure out how to kill mediadirect and that stupid button once and for all.

or:
(2) I get in there and copy all data from D: (shared NTFS data partition) to an external hard drive (but I have no idea how to do this when windows is kaput) and then reinstall the whole mediadirect/vista/ubuntu.

Obviously I prefer (1) because with (2) I would still need to find a way to kill mediadirect, which means that I’d have to go for a third reinstall later on. I mean, with my previous machine I was able to reinstall one OS without affecting the other OS and the data… Isnt it the point of partitioning? I wanna be able to do this with the XPS too, but mediadirect seems to be a problem…

I know that this post is partially redundant with other members’, but I personally find it annoying when someone starts a thread and someone else posts a reply with a whole different problem, and then u gotta figure out whos answering who…

Any help would be appreciated, especially if u could skip the part where u insult me for my stupidity

 

You say you had an ubuntu partition? So you must have an ubuntu live cd, can you not boot into that and have a look at what is still there? Backup what you can, and start fresh.
Alternatively, you might even be able to install the grub bootloader (this is on the Ubuntu Live CD) and completely salvage the whole shebang.

MediaDirect rightfully has a bad reputation, but if you start fresh and follow the steps in various guides available here, you should end up with a stable perfectly working machine. And for the love of god, get rid of macaffee!!!

 

yeah, i booted from ubuntu live cd but i stopped in the middle of things because i was really afraid it'd wipe out my D: partition before i could backup the data... I'll try again

And yes, macafee is SOOOOOO gone...

 

Booting from a live CD will be perfectly safe, it runs off the CD and won't touch the hard-drive (unless you click 'install' once you are in the liveCD OS). It'll give you a fully working computer regardless of how messed up your hard-drive is. That's the great thing about livecds

Hopefully you will be able to browse the contents of the drives, and backup your files.

Im not a linux expert, so it might be worth checking some ubuntu forums. If the contents of all the partitions are intact, it should be completely possible to just put a new bootloader on there and get your system fully working again. Media direct sucks ass anyway, I would just use the partition utility in ubuntu to wipe it, and then put on a new grub bootloader. But your situation sounds pretty messed up, so get as much advice as possible before doing anything yet.

 

That's what I'd do. Boot from LiveCD, recover your data, and then you could either

1. Reinstall everything

or

2. Open up GParted partition editor from within Ubuntu and change the boot flag to the Windows or Ubuntu partition and see if it works.

 

thanks guys! I'm gonna try with ubuntu livecd and/or geparted and report back.

I was thinking... What if I deleted that C: partition that mediadirect has created? perhaps it would help...

 

i had something similar. pressed media direct key while laptop was off.. it half booted media direct then got a bsod. thought id lost everything, hard resets only gave OS option of 'XP embedded'? (media direct i guess)

it was weirdly remedied by just pressing the media direct button again when i had turned it off, and vista then booted as normal (in fact, resumed from a hibernation)

hope that helps

 

Do a search for a little utility called "FixMBR". It's a command line utility which works great to fix you bootloader woes.

 

Can't you just do that from the Vista repair disc?

 

Probably......but I found FixMBR to be easier.

 

well, guys, thank you all for your help. I booted from the ubuntu liveCD and backed up all my data on an external hard drive. Then I booted from the mediadirect CD and re-installed vista, office, etc...

The only thing is, the first time I used the external hard drive in a windows environment, vista ran a "check for consistency".

@pixelot: my vista disk is the one that Dell provides with the laptop: I don't have a 'vista repair disk'.
@khris: thanks for the hint, I'm gonna check it out.