You can leave mediadirect and just reinstall this drive.  You may have difficulties initially trying to get it to boot but that can be easily fixed with a program called dsrfix which is free.

 

Since you are not creating a dual boot, however, you shouldnt have any probs...

 

Good Luck.

 

Flamenko

 

 

"can I just reformat the WinXP partition and leave the Dell restore and media direct partition alone?"

 

Yes.

 

Reinstalling XP will disable MD, but use the MediaDirect Repair Utility to reenable it.  The utility will work with or without a Dell restore partition (for people who wish to dispense with the restore partition), but you must keep the Dell utility partition (the small 30-60 MB partition at the front) intact, so don't get rid of that one.

 

 

it's been a while since i got mine, but if you order the disks, i don't think you get the restore parition.  maybe i did and when i saw how worthless it was (paying for ghost?  are you serious), i blew it away.  anyway, here's what i've done numerous times on the same m1210.

 

pop in windows disk, boot from it, delete all paritions, EXCEPT THE UTILITY PARTITION (the small 60mb first one), install to the remaining parition completely.  after installation is complete, boot from the diagnositic cd, choose the dos boot option, go to the media direct repair directory (mdr or md2 md5 - something like that) by using cd mdr (or whatever the name is, I forget).  type in repair (you can hit dir to list directory contents, but i believe repair is the .bat file name; if it isn't, that's what you need to run).  it will say it is fixed. turn off laptop and press the md button.  viola. 

 

keep in mind, that i have never seen the parition.  it's like 3.5GB (i read).  On a 100GB hard drive, the parition i installed windows onto shows up as 93GB in the windows install screen.

 

if you don't have the diagnostics cd, you can download an image of a media direct repair cd by going to windows xp support for the m1210.

Thanks guys. 

For now I will just reformat the WinXP partition just to be on the safe side.  Maybe when I upgrade to Vista I will remove both the WinXP and Dell restore partition.