Vista without Mediadirect: anyone?

Hi, my brand new XPS M1330 is just arrived at home.
I wish to know if someone succesfully installed Vista without installing also Mediadirect.
I knew there if you are going to press the HOME button for mistake some problems will be happened ( if Mediadirect is not installed ).


Thanks in advance.

 

If you haven't installed MediaDirect then pressing the Home button will not affect your system in any way.

 

Are you sure about that?

I can remember once when I installed xp on my m1210 and gentoo, a dual boot without Mediadirect, i pressed HOME button accidentally, and it gave me blue screen of death, and It repartiotioned my hard and I loose my xp installation, but not my gentoo ( I had to change grub.conf because it changed my partitions , but gentoo was living ).

 

I have removed MediaDirect from my 1720, and now pressing that button means nothing. I did a complete format when I received this notebook, and removed MediaDirect, and the recovery partition. Works great.

 

Perhaps the dual-boot is at fault here since Silas managed a proper reformat leaving the button completely non-functional.

 

I wiped out the MediaDirect partition on my Vostro 1500 to install Ubuntu. Ubuntu installed the GRUB loader on the master boot record. When I cleared the MBR using the instructions here, pushing the MediaDirect button launched Vista just like the regular power button.

 

I suggest removing the recovery partition (after saving the files in there to another computer or USB drive) then installing media direct and then vista again. Media Direct is only 3 gigs. The recovery Partition is 10 gigs. Of course if you dont use the media direct at all then go ahead and delete it. Its not a bad feature for 3 gigs.
Anyway thats what I did and I got back 10 gigs.
Saving your recovery files allows you to download a bootable winpe cd or create one yourself and reinstall the factory setup whenever you want if you want to later.

 

Yes. I have installed Vista successfully without Mediadirect.

Nothing happens if you press the Home button when in Vista.

Mediadirect tries to boot and shows an error message if you press the Home button when the notebook is switched off.

PS: I deleted all partitions and then installed vista. I don't know if the behaviour is same if the 1st hidden primary partition is not deleted.

 

That's not the case with me. I've pressed the MediaDirect button when my notebook was in use, when it was switched off, and when it was in the sleep mode. Nothing happened, just like it should be. I formatted my hard-disk in such a way, that it looked like as if it just came from it's factory, with absolutely nothing on it.

 

Do you still have the hidden partition? Check that in Computer Management > Disk Management