How to Easily Fix XPS M1330 Broken by Media Direct Button

Hi, this was extremely useful for me, so I thought I'd post it here. I reformatted my XPS M1330 and installed Windows XP only; a couple days ago my girlfriend accidentally hit the Media Direct button, 'bricking' my computer as some people said it would.

I searched for ages on how to fix it, and eventually found this:
http://tb-kmblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/value-of-search-engines.html

You just hit the media direct button again, while the computer is off. That's it. Unbelievably simple. I don't know if it will work for everybody, but it worked for me. Good luck!

Though now I'm wondering how to disable the button for the future. All the posts I've found about this seem like they have some dangers of their own. Does anyone know an equally easy way to disable (or remap) the button, not just in Windows, but while the computer is off?

Thanks!

- Alex

 

Wow, you can brick your XPS with the touch of easily accessible button? AWESOME.

Thanks for the post Blinkity, I'm sure someone will find this useful.

 

It would be great to be able to disable that button! Though I fear that it takes hardware work, meaning you probably need to cut the wire from the button or something like that. Since it is actually working as the powerbutton does without BIOS or anything startet..

 

Cut the wire. You can always request a replacement from Dell 'cause this things break easily.

 

There have been posts here about this before. Apparently the "push the button again" fix sometimes stops working, and then you're stuck. It's best to delete the hidden partition with the Media Direct on it when you reformat.

 

Oh wow. When I heard about the feature, I thought it was pretty awesome. I mean you can play your media files without starting Windows. But I guess there's a pretty big problem with that media direct button if you want to roll back to XP?

 

That would be fraud.

 

Delete the media direct partition. Do a complete reformat of the drive... I don't know if that is the only way to do it, but my media direct button doesn't do anything anymore.. doesn't even light up when I press it under windows.. And from shutdown/sleep/hibernate, it simply resumes windows..