Removing Hidden Media Direct Partition (HPA)

Hi,

just recently my brother accidentally hit the media direct button that is next to the power button. The button activated the hidden media direct partition, which then proceeded to repartition the HDD and turn my previous windows XP pro partition into a giant 100+ GB "unallocated space".

After many hours of googling I've yet to find a solution that works.

Hitachi Feature Tool says I have 120GB, Windows XP Boot Disk/Setup says I have 111GB available, and same for Gparted Live Boot CD.

I tried zero filling the drive with gparted, but it still doesn't get rid of the hidden media direct partition, and no matter how many times i delete and format all partitions, hitting the media direct button when the PC is off will always load it and always repartition everything, setting 1.65GB for a new visible partition, and turning the rest into unallocated space.

I've heard about a program called HPA.exe but can't find it anywhere.

I've also tried HDAT2, but it hangs when I try to run in the dos boot it comes with.

I'm really at a loss here... the only other option I can think of is to either pop the button out or physically disconnect it somehow, but I don't want to void my warranty.

Dell support was utterly useless and had no answers

I have a Vostro 1500 btw, with "120" GB fujitsu.

 

Well, let me let you in on a little secret.

When hard drive makers make their drives, they say that one gigabyte is one billion bytes (10^9). When operating systems look at it, they think a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30).

Thus, you have this ratio where 1GB on the HDD's description is actually only 0.931 gigabytes when an operating system sees it.

Multiply your stated hard drive size by this ratio and you get 0.931*120 = 111.8

Which is about what you have available. MediaDirect™ is gone and done. 111.8 Gigabytes is your true hard drive size.

 

Whoah, that sounds scary. What will happen if I accidentally press my MediaDirect button??

I deleted my recovery and mediadirect partitions using windows Computer Manager. Right click on "My Computer" and click "Manage".

Then go to "Storage" to see all the partitions. You can then delete the hidden partitions (10gb for the recovery one, and 2gb for the mediadirect one). You can then create new empty partitions as storage spaces, or use the empty space to expand your other partitions.

Careful tho, you don't want to delete your other partitions by accident.

 

Media direct is not gone. Hit the MD button again, up comes splash screen, then the loading screen and out goes partition table.

I'm going to try secure erase with "ultimate boot disk"

It only seems to happen to those who have initially formatted and installed their own OS when they got their dells. And it only seems to cause trouble when the button is pressed while the laptop is off.

EDIT: I think I finally got rid of this thing.

Using some help from Dan Goodell:

1. Run Windows XP Recovery Console, type "fixmbr"
2. immediately Run Hitachi Feature Tool boot disk after your restart, using the change capacity feature, set it to Max
3. Use Gparted Live Boot CD, get into GUI, bring up terminal/command line, use "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" to zero fill drive. If it seems like it zero filled instantly, it didn't, let it wait a while (5 min for every GB of your drive). You might be able to use Windows XP boot disk to format, but i wanted to be safe and went for zero fill.
4. turn off PC after zero fill, try the media direct button, it should just show the splash screen that is stored in BIOS, then it should give you "No boot sector on internal drive"
5. boot from your chosen OS boot disk to create partitions/format/install etc.

The sequence is important

...now i'm going to try and reassign the media direct button for something useful...

 

That's what I want to do. Ideally, I'd like to make it into a "sleep button" and be able to assign it a command in power options.

I recently installed (cloned) a new HD and the Media Direct HPA caused all sorts of problems making the 120GB HD appear the same as the 60 GB HD that it replaced. I did the Hitachi Feature Tool then RoadKill's SelectEdit to zero out LBA 3 so it wouldn't happen again. That effectively disables MD, although from off, if I hit the MD button I briefly get a MD splash screen, before booting into XP.

Directions for zeroing LBA 3 can be found here.

Besides, reassigning the MD button, I'd like to eliminate all traces of MD.

Any help would be appreciated.