Host Protected Area

I recently aquired a Dell XPS M1330. In the process of formatting the HD and installing WinXP Pro I realized that Dell had sectioned off a small chunk of the HD for a Host Protected Area (used to launch their Media Direct OS). Anybody have any advice or success stories in preferably erasing the HPA and reclaiming the HD space or worst case scenario simply reprogramming the Media Direct button to something more useful?

 

when u installed xp, u should've deleted the partition

 

If you delete the MD partition and install new OS you might screw your MBR if you ever press that MD button next to the power button.
Look through Les' sticky on the reinstall of Vista and bloatware removal for tips.

 

samosa: I didn't realize at the time the computer came with a HD that had a HPA. Unfortunately, when installing WinXP you can only delete partitions that are not protected. Subsequently, I did delete the original Vista partition, the restore partition and what I thought was the only MD partition.

lqaddict: What does MBR stand for, motherboard? I have tried pressing the MD direct button. When the computer is off it powers up the computer and boots off the HPA area. Since I deleted the content partition the computer goes in an endless loop, trying to load Dell Media Direct, failing and then trying again. If you hold down the power and force a shut down, then press the MD button again, it boots normal back into Windows. If you are in XP and press the MD button, a pop-up launches saying it can't launch MD. You click ok and it goes away.

Anyway, I did read Les's sticky before posting and while I didn't read through all 100 or so pages, I didn't find exactly what I am looking for. I'm not trying to restore or fix Media Direct, I want to completely delete it. A friend suggested I boot a copy of linux like knoppix and gnu fdisk. I also did some research and discovered that both seagate and hitachi make software that might be able to fix this. I just can't afford to screw and thing up. So before I try anything, I just wanted to see if anybody else had any experiences with this.

 

Anybody? I know more people have put XP on their m1330's!

 

Oh BTW, lqaddict, I realized by MBR you meant Master Book Recorder, my bad.

 

MBR - master boot record, correct. As for deleting the partition entirely you can use gparted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php LiveCD.

 

any bootable partition tool will do it. Gparted (above post) is a good example of a free one

this may be a better link

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php