Reinstall Vista and Media Direct withhout deleting Recovery Partition

Hello
So I currently installed Ubuntu and it was good but It drained my battery so I decided to take it off. After that my computer started to act weird. The Media Direct partition appeared in next to my OS and Recovery partitions. When i would press the MD button, I would get a blue screen and eventually every time I press the button It just turns on my computer. When I try to turn it back on after putting it on hibernate, it states that windows did not turn off right and it restarts windows. I have decided to a clean reinstall of Vista and MD but I have a few questions. I found this tutorial on how to do it on the internet but i found that i have to completely delete all the partitions including the recovery partition. I was wondering if there is a way to do this without having to delete that partition? Thanks?

 

You don't need to reinstall MD, you need to recover it. You should have a disk from Dell to do that. It will fix the master boot record.

Let me know what disks you have.

Greg

 

I have all the disks. The re-installation disk of vista and MD and the drivers cd.

 

Do you have a MD disk with an instruction booklet in it?

What laptop do you have by the way? What version MD?

Greg

 

I have the M1330 and I think it is the 3.3 version I don't have the cd with me being I'm at school.

 

You cannot repair the MD 3.x button functionality without starting with a fresh install using the MD disk to create the hidden MD partition, then installing the OS. That older repair procedure was for MD 2.x and XP.

You can save the D: RECOVERY partition with the factory.wim file and the tools folder and put it back as the third partition of the newly formatted (with MD disk) hard drive. The Dell Factory Image Restore utility will not show under Repair options in Startup Repair but you can run it from the dos prompt under startup repair.

 

Hey,
could u please explain it more on HOW TO?
I really dont want to mess my inspiron... I am willing to make my 160 GB hard drive into 4 partition with dell media direct 3.5 working and recovery partition untouched...
whats factory.wim and where i can find it and where i have to paste it?
please let us know coz ur sign show

So u can help us...
I need a partition for
vista. (C) of 30 GB...
partition recovery (D) 10 GB...
Music/movies(E) 50 GB...
Stuffs(F) 50 GB...
+/- GBs as required...
with dell media (partition) working...
Tell me how can i do it?

regards

 

OK here is what I did and worked great for me:
1-First save you data to external drive.
2-Boot using the MD DVD to re-paration hard drive (I used the second option and set the C: drive size to 39 GB).
3- Install Windows from the Win DVD on the C: drive then install the drivers.
4-Boot into windows and installed MD
5-Format the second part of the Hard Drive (from windows) and that becomes drive D:
6- Move Documents and other things to point to drive D:

I have every thing including the Media keys working correctly.

 

soliman15,
what you said is not a big deal,everywhere you can find this method.But what i am talking is 4 partitions c,d,e,f... with dell media direct working...
c for vista
d for recovery
e for stuffs
f for movies/music
Hideen Partitions: dell media direct and digno..

now u got me?
I think TOM can answer me...

 

That should be similar so as step 5 in windows I will go to computer management delete the second large partition (it should be logical drive) and create three instead (d, e, f), then format them and use them they way you wish.

 

ok but by this way media direct wont work...
i did it already...

 

tom,
Please let me know how u manage to install 3 os with working media direct?

 

Indyan,
I'm sorry this reply took so long. I've been away from hacking the 'puter for a couple weeks. Here's a link that got me started on the Quad Boot thing. It's not really well written but it works....

https://stairway27.net/blog/2008/02/23/m1330-quadruple-boot-mediadirect/


Tom