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tahlsr

36 Posts

13909

June 19th, 2008 13:00

MediaDirect 3.5 on Vostro 1500 doesn't work after imaging drive, just boots to Windows

Hi all, any help you can provide would be greatly appreicated.

Initially I had an Inspiron 1520 with MediaDirect 3.3 working fine and then I would want to image

that drive and put it on another hard drive for another 1520.  The problem was the MediaDirect

button wouldn't boot to the MediaDirect partition after imaging.  With help I was given the solution:

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=sw_other&thread.id=63328

 

This fix, however, stopped working now that I have moved to the Vostro 1500.

I currently have a Vostro 1500 with MediaDirect working just fine.

I then used Acronis to image the entire drive which gives me the MBR and 3 partitions.

I've tried to just image the c:\ partition to a new hard drive (that had MediaDirect partitions already)

and then uninstall and reinstall MediaDirect but it won't boot to MediaDirect from the MediaDirect button.

 

Any other ideas? 

tahlsr

36 Posts

June 25th, 2008 19:00

I just want to add that this is the case even if the hard drives are the same size.

DELL-Larry R

1.7K Posts

July 7th, 2008 21:00

Does Acronis change hte MBR or partition table at all when it creates or writes the image?  Part of what makes the Media Direct button work is software written to the MBR by the Media Direct installation program when it is first installed either before Windows is loaded or when the Media Direct software install is finalized after installing the OS.

tahlsr

36 Posts

July 8th, 2008 12:00

Thanks for responding.  I can't speak for Acronis and what they do or don't do to the MBR or partition table.  I do know that when you are putting an image onto a new drive using an acronis, there are 4 checkboxes you can restore.  1.) MBR and Track 0,  2.) Some Fat16 47MB partition,   3.) The main NTFS partition (where you install windows to),   4.) The Fat32 MediaDirect 3GB partition.     I suppose I could email this question to Acronis support and see what they say too.   I don't think I've done that and certainly will now and keep this thread updated.

DELL-Larry R

1.7K Posts

July 8th, 2008 16:00

From the sounds of it your system has the Windows partition (NTFS), Media Direct and the Dell Onboard Diagnostics (the 47Mb one).  I would suggest running the Media Direct setup, installing the image onto the drive and then doing the Media Direct setup in Windows, but I'm pretty sure that the image load would overwrite anything Media Direct did to the MBR/partitioning making it a waste of time.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have any other suggestions for you on this.  Someone else might have run into it, but Acronis would be where I would look next.

tahlsr

36 Posts

July 8th, 2008 17:00

great suggestion as I had interestingly enough been able to get what you said to work previously on Inspiron 1520's.  That is to say that I would boot the new hard drive to the MediaDirect CD and let it partition the drive.  I would then 'image over' only the ntfs partition of my backed up image to the new ntfs partition.  Then it would boot fine to windows and I would uninstall and reinstall MediaDirect.  Alas, that trick no longer works for some reason.

 

xcator

2 Intern

 • 

887 Posts

July 13th, 2008 20:00

If you have time you may want to play around and do a repair to the boot ini.  or you might try another imaging program. For ghost 14 you would need to make an image of each partition and then first restore the mediadirect image to the new drive (must be unallocated), then your other partitions.  It may or may not boot correctly, but that can be fixed with a repair. 

tahlsr

36 Posts

July 15th, 2008 12:00

thanks for the tips.  So far no good.

 

xcator

2 Intern

 • 

887 Posts

July 15th, 2008 17:00

were you able to play around try a repair of the boot ini and fixmbr?

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