Safe to remove Dell's hidden Miediadirect partition?

Hi,

I'd like to remove my dell 9400's hidden mediadirect partition using hpa.exe. Does anyone know if this is safe to do -s there any risk?

That's all - I hope someone here knows...

sache

 

I did this on a E1405 that I set up for somebody with no problem.

It recovered 1443 MB of space on the HD.

 

When I got my Dell I removed the while entire system restore partition and gained around 3-4GB. You might want to look into that too, as long as you have back up discs.

 

hi, i've removed the system restore partition, it's just the hidden mediadirect one that needs something to be done the the MBR and then removed using hpa.exe - but I don't know exactly what to do to the MBR or how safe it is...

and I certainly don't trust those idiots at dell tech support to help me they probably dont even realise there is an hpa - they're just useless (in my experience) - ah, felt good to get that off my chest...

 

I'm curious, if you get this to work, how you did it. I downloaded hpa.exe, put it on a USB stick, booted from it and ran 'hpa reset', but the HPA partition is still there, same as before.

 

After I booted to a command prompt I ran hpa.exe from a CD and I think it gave me a list of all of my partitions including the HPA. I selected it and deleted it. I don't remember the process exactly, but it was pretty easy.

 

I am so glad someone finally asked this question. After Dell Tech Support asked me to manually enter a bunch of assembly code, I found this really user-friendly way of clearing the HPA, and have been dying to tell someone.

Most hard drive manufacturers have a utility to do this quick and easy:

Seagate Disk Wizard:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

Hitachi Feature Tool:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

I'm sure the other manufacturers have a similar utility: these are just the two I've used.

How to use it: just boot up the disk and look for the option that says "Set Disk Size" and set it to the maximum size. Then go into the Windows installer (or similar) and format the newly available space (Oatmeal is right, exactly 1443MB in the case of MediaDirect).

 

OK, I'll try the Seagate one. I've tried Hitachi Feature Tool already, and when I got to actually deleting the HPA it said it couldn't perform the operation or something.

Oatmeal, it sounds like you may have a different hpa.exe than I do. Where did you get yours?

EDIT: Thanks, the Seagate tool did the trick. Guess the Hitachi one didn't like me for some reason.

 

I Goggled for it and found it on a website. I did this a couple of months ago and now I can't find the site again when I run "HPA.exe" through Google. I'm going to look through my files and if I run across it I'll let you know. I'd be surprised if version you have is different from the one I used though.

 

Maybe not. It was just that you mentioned selecting the partition, which made it sound like yours had some sort of menu/interface, which mine didn't.

 

Have you tried running the Dell MediaDirect repair utility? If not, you might try that and then run HPA.exe again. I know when I ran it it listed the HPA area of the drive and it gave me the option of getting rid of it. It could be that you have to repair your MBR using the repair utility for HPA.exe to see it.

 

Yes, I have tried running the repair utility, and that had nothing to do whether it could see the HPA.

I have it working now anyway. I removed the HPA with the Seagate Disc Wizard and then did the reinstall of MediaDirect.

I think the repair utility failed because I installed GRUB over the standard boot block. According to what I read, the repair utility only repairs MBR-0 and not MBR-3, and GRUB overwrites both. There doesn't seem to be any way to repair MBR-3 without going through the full reinstall, as I did.

 

I'm glad that you got it to work. I finally remembered what utility I used to remove the HPA. It wasn’t HPA.exe, it was another utility called PARemove.exe that is a component of a software package called "ProDiscover". I downloaded the trial version of this software and extracted this tool from the installation.

I have uploaded this file here for the benefit of others that might want to get rid of the HPA on their Dell HD:

http://www.allencc.edu/ftp/instruct/mmckinnis/PARemove.zip

 

When should I run PARemove?

Does deleting the MD partition in HPA remove MD? After deleting the partition, would that mean that the laptop wont do anything when the MD button is pressed when the laptop is off?

 

After running the Seagate tool, this is what I have managed to uncover.



I ran the windows installation disc and it detected the 1443MB of unallocated space.

The newly uncovered disk space is the 1.41GB (Unallocated) So, what should I do with this partition now?

Format it? But, I dont want it to be another logical drive.

I just want to remove media direct.