If you've got a Dell laptop that is several years old, many of you will be aware of the living hell that is Dell Media Direct (referred to forthwith in this post as DMD). This is a program installed inside a partition on your hard drive, the idea behind which was to be able to access multimedia applications quickly even with the power off simply by pressing the home button on the keyboard.
Fine, good idea in theory. What happens in practice is that if inadvertently pressed, you can be caught in an infinite loop on boot up where the laptop never gets past the DMD screen and therefore you cannot access Windows.
For anyone interested, this excellent post by Dan Goodell explains in much more detail how this partition works:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.shtml
There is a quick fix which works for many, which is simply to press the Home button again with the power off, and the machine toggles back from the DMD screen to boot straight into Windows. For many others, though, this fix does not work and what ensues is a nightmare trial-and-error process taking several hours or days of pressing random keys, following hunches, researching on internet forums and blindly installing recommended pieces of software in the hope that they might just work and extricate you from Groundhog Day.
Please bear with me here, this is going to be quite a long post. Yes, I have a problem, which will be listed near the end, but I also want to detail my problems and how I went about trying to cure them to hopefully help the poor unfortunates who encounter the same and do not know where to turn. Nobody should have to waste four days of their life (as I have) trying to solve an issue that has purely come about due to a bad decision made by the manufacturer which may have looked like a world-beater to them when it presumably reared its head at one of those wonderful brainstorming sessions. (I am sure there are sufficient unhappy customers out there to launch a Class Action Suit against Dell for the time wasted and hardware wrecked by DMD, but that's for another time and place).
Let's cut to the chase.
I have an Inspiron 1720 laptop. It was running Vista when I bought it, but I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit to have it running the same system as my PC.
At some stage (six years after first buying the machine) I inadvertently pressed the Home/Dell Media Direct(DMD) button and got stuck in the loop mentioned above and unable to access Windows.
Several websites (two are listed below) suggested deleting the partition that DMD was stored in, and reclaim the space used by merging it with the partition containing the OS:
http://www.ehow.com/how_5816017_remo...ia-direct.html
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/remov...ect-57327.html
I was unsuccessful doing this with EASEUS Partition Master, but it worked with AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard.
A side effect of this, though, was a new problem on Boot Up, my system showing me a DMD welcome screen and hanging there, with an addition DOS message: MD extended partition table error.
I thought my recently upgraded laptop (I had also just upped the memory from 2GB to 4GB) was toast. Hours of trawling through the internet failed to provide a fix, but last night I came across one myself, purely by accident and trial and error. For anyone experiencing the same problem and having given up, allow the laptop to hang at this message and simply press "Cntrl + Alt + Delete" (i.e. the same keys as you would to access Task Manager) this will either take you straight to the Windows Boot screen, or into system diagnostics (called the Pre-Boot System Assessment), which you can then follow the prompts to escape from. The best thing is that unlike other methods, this WORKS EVERY TIME WITHOUT FAIL.
For reference, in case it is relevant: I had made a system repair disk the minute I had upgraded to Windows 7, and followed the instructions contained in this link to try and restore the master boot record (MBR). http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...ot-record.html. It seemed to have no effect and having read somewhere that I run this three consecutive times it hung the second time, saying that I had a problem it could not fix and suggested I contacted Windows. I cannot recall the message it gave me, sorry.
So, after four days of trials and tribulations, I am sort of happy. I have a functioning laptop again and am able to access what I need for an upcoming trip away. But I would really appreciate help with the two problems listed below and eradicate Dell Media Direct and ease to a degree my loathing for the company whose head office can be found in Round Rock, Texas:
(i) Is there any way to bypass the original message I am seeing on Power Up, namely the Dell Media Direct screen and the message "MD extended partition table error" and boot smoothly and seamlessly into Windows 7? I have trawled through all my registry entries and can find no apparent trace of DMD remaining on my system.
(ii) Another unfortunate and unwanted side effect of this DMD nightmare is that I cannot power off my machine in conventional manner by shutting down. Because DMD was designed by some oaf to allow you to access it even with the power off, when I shut down my laptop it still thinks it is stuck in DMD and automatically powers itself up again, hanging at the screen mentioned above. The only way I have, therefore, of powering off, is by removing the power cable and disconnecting the battery. Hardly satisfactory.
Thanks in advance for any help. I'm not a techie, I'm a journalist, so please keep any instructions simple! ;)
Fine, good idea in theory. What happens in practice is that if inadvertently pressed, you can be caught in an infinite loop on boot up where the laptop never gets past the DMD screen and therefore you cannot access Windows.
For anyone interested, this excellent post by Dan Goodell explains in much more detail how this partition works:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.shtml
There is a quick fix which works for many, which is simply to press the Home button again with the power off, and the machine toggles back from the DMD screen to boot straight into Windows. For many others, though, this fix does not work and what ensues is a nightmare trial-and-error process taking several hours or days of pressing random keys, following hunches, researching on internet forums and blindly installing recommended pieces of software in the hope that they might just work and extricate you from Groundhog Day.
Please bear with me here, this is going to be quite a long post. Yes, I have a problem, which will be listed near the end, but I also want to detail my problems and how I went about trying to cure them to hopefully help the poor unfortunates who encounter the same and do not know where to turn. Nobody should have to waste four days of their life (as I have) trying to solve an issue that has purely come about due to a bad decision made by the manufacturer which may have looked like a world-beater to them when it presumably reared its head at one of those wonderful brainstorming sessions. (I am sure there are sufficient unhappy customers out there to launch a Class Action Suit against Dell for the time wasted and hardware wrecked by DMD, but that's for another time and place).
Let's cut to the chase.
I have an Inspiron 1720 laptop. It was running Vista when I bought it, but I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit to have it running the same system as my PC.
At some stage (six years after first buying the machine) I inadvertently pressed the Home/Dell Media Direct(DMD) button and got stuck in the loop mentioned above and unable to access Windows.
Several websites (two are listed below) suggested deleting the partition that DMD was stored in, and reclaim the space used by merging it with the partition containing the OS:
http://www.ehow.com/how_5816017_remo...ia-direct.html
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/remov...ect-57327.html
I was unsuccessful doing this with EASEUS Partition Master, but it worked with AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard.
A side effect of this, though, was a new problem on Boot Up, my system showing me a DMD welcome screen and hanging there, with an addition DOS message: MD extended partition table error.
I thought my recently upgraded laptop (I had also just upped the memory from 2GB to 4GB) was toast. Hours of trawling through the internet failed to provide a fix, but last night I came across one myself, purely by accident and trial and error. For anyone experiencing the same problem and having given up, allow the laptop to hang at this message and simply press "Cntrl + Alt + Delete" (i.e. the same keys as you would to access Task Manager) this will either take you straight to the Windows Boot screen, or into system diagnostics (called the Pre-Boot System Assessment), which you can then follow the prompts to escape from. The best thing is that unlike other methods, this WORKS EVERY TIME WITHOUT FAIL.
For reference, in case it is relevant: I had made a system repair disk the minute I had upgraded to Windows 7, and followed the instructions contained in this link to try and restore the master boot record (MBR). http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...ot-record.html. It seemed to have no effect and having read somewhere that I run this three consecutive times it hung the second time, saying that I had a problem it could not fix and suggested I contacted Windows. I cannot recall the message it gave me, sorry.
So, after four days of trials and tribulations, I am sort of happy. I have a functioning laptop again and am able to access what I need for an upcoming trip away. But I would really appreciate help with the two problems listed below and eradicate Dell Media Direct and ease to a degree my loathing for the company whose head office can be found in Round Rock, Texas:
(i) Is there any way to bypass the original message I am seeing on Power Up, namely the Dell Media Direct screen and the message "MD extended partition table error" and boot smoothly and seamlessly into Windows 7? I have trawled through all my registry entries and can find no apparent trace of DMD remaining on my system.
(ii) Another unfortunate and unwanted side effect of this DMD nightmare is that I cannot power off my machine in conventional manner by shutting down. Because DMD was designed by some oaf to allow you to access it even with the power off, when I shut down my laptop it still thinks it is stuck in DMD and automatically powers itself up again, hanging at the screen mentioned above. The only way I have, therefore, of powering off, is by removing the power cable and disconnecting the battery. Hardly satisfactory.
Thanks in advance for any help. I'm not a techie, I'm a journalist, so please keep any instructions simple! ;)