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sluke5

5 Posts

8893

December 14th, 2006 13:00

Media Direct and Vista Upgrade (bootloader question)

I have seen on this message board and elsewhere that it is possible to get media direct to work with vista if you first install media direct under Windows XP and then upgrade. I have taken this route (install XP, install media direct 2, then install Vista Business). However I cannot get media direct to run. When I press the media direct button from a powered off state, I get the media direct splash screen and then Vista loads as usual.

I have seen people suggest that you can get media direct to work if you use the dell tools cd to repair the media direct installation. I tried this with a previous install and I was able to boot into media direct just as advertised. Unfortunately I was ONLY able to boot to media direct. Pressing the normal power button got media direct as well! To make matters worse, the vista dvd was unable to repair my bootloader (I think because the utility had replaced it with an xp bootloader) and I had to start over with a fresh install of xp.

My speculation is that the people who reported getting media direct to work with vista were using earlier beta (or rc) builds which I believe still used the same mbr as Windows XP.

My question is this. Does anyone know if it is possible to: 1) get the vista bootloader to start the media direct partition when I press the media direct button and 2) allow it to still boot to Vista. Is this just a question of changing the configuration of the vista bootloader or is media direct somehow incompatible with the vista bootloader?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

mombodog

12.7K Posts

December 14th, 2006 22:00

Don't know much about media direct but sounds like a cool tool, here is what I did find
 
 
I know this is a guide for Reinstalling on XP but it syas something about creating a second partiton, maybe Vista is changing this partition during install? Just a thought. Vista has a completely different bootloader than XP.
 
Good luck
 

sluke5

5 Posts

December 15th, 2006 00:00

Thanks for the links.  The first one I had seen a long time ago and forgotten about.  It's a good set of info and that's basically the process I used to get Media Direct to work when I had XP working.  It looks like the problem comes whenever I "upgrade" to vista.  After that happens I cannot seem to get media direct to boot at all.  I believe that this has to do with the new boot configuration database and bootloader in Vista.  I've been looking at pages like:
 
http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79102
 
To figure out how this works. (there's also a page on a microsoft site but I've misplaced the url at the moment).  I've looked at the current database on my computer and there is no mention of any other operating system or other partitions.  When I look at the disk manager, it shows the media direct partition at the end of the disk, but it is not even marked as bootable (and windows won't let me change any of its properties). 
 
As mentioned in the second link you posted, I can get the media direct utility to work if I run the media direct repair utility.  However it seems that it is overwriting Vista's mbr with its own mbr that does not know about the vista partition at all (I'm assuming this is the reason that I cannot boot vista after I run the utility).  The way I see it, I have three potential avenues to get both media direct and vista to work at the same time:
 
1.  Fix the vista boot configuration database so that it knows about the media direct partition and hope that the button will access the correct entry to boot it.
2.  Run the media direct repair utility and then figure out how to get the windows xp boot loader that it installs to recognize vista (this is slightly complicated by the fact that once I run the repair utility I will not have a working OS to boot into until I get the bootloader working again).  I might be able to figure out this by looking at some pages on dual booting (perhaps the linux people have figured this one out).
3.  Wait for Dell to release a media direct that is compatible with Vista and then beg support to send me a copy.
 
I'm a little squeamish about attempting 1 or 2 because I use this machine for my research and every time I hose my windows installation and have to start over I loose something like a day of work time reinstalling everything from backups.  However, if anyone really understands the bootloaders in question and how media direct works I would be quite psyched to get everything to work again.
 
Luke

mombodog

12.7K Posts

December 15th, 2006 01:00

sluke5

5 Posts

December 15th, 2006 01:00

Thanks!  I hadn't come across that utility before. 

mombodog

12.7K Posts

December 15th, 2006 01:00

I have a million of them, just can't remember where they are..  :-))

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