what happens when you press the media direct button? If it doesn't do anything, have you put in a new hard drive recently, you may have not the media direct partition available.

Yes nothing happens. It used to work fine before and then suddenly stopped (i haven't change anything to the laptop). I just bought the laptop and the partition is there when i check disk management.

When i check the bios the primary hard drive space read 100mb but the partition is shown in disk management.

 

Would uninstalling and reinstalling the program help?

 

Thanks for your response

In the BIOS it should show 2GB less then the reported space on the drive, if you have a 100GB drive then it should show up as 98.

 

You could try repairing MediaDirect, you can get the software from Dell's website, support.dell.com, then drivers and downloads, then put in your service tag, then downloading the MediaDirectRepair utility, once you've got it downloaded then you'll have to make a bootable disk with the file on it and then boot from it. The Repair Utility fixes any problems with the boot file associated with MediaDirect, if that isn't the problem, then you might have to reinstall it.

 

As far as reinstalling it goes. You'll have to repartition your hard drive and make a partition to install it on to, which may mean completely erasing everything you have on your computer now and reinstalling the operating system, but if the partition is still there, like it says in Disk Management then you may be able to install it on the available partition. You'll need the media Direct cd, so if you don't have one of those then you'll have to call up tech support and they will be able to send you one.

Hi, thanks for the response and help. I'll try the media direct repair utility.

 

If that doesn't work then i'll reinstall since the CD came with the laptop.

 

thanks again.

THIS IS FOR ANYONE WHO HAS SIMILAR PROBLEMS

 

Ok well i contacted dell support and apparently I was mistaken about some things. The Dell Media Direct Button only works outsides windows (ie when you computer is off). I tested and it does work outside windows.

However, I'm puzzled by the usefulness of this feature since my laptop is on all the time.

Also why did it work several times within Windows? Was it because of the initial wizard setup it had to go through. The first times I used it i said i would do the wizard later and i guess now that i think about after i did the setup it stopped launching in windows ( can't remember for sure)

 

Anyway i find it weird this feature is for use with the computer off and not really helpful for me.

So if this is true so be it.