Disabling Mediadirect button

Question

I have recently purchased an XPS M1210, on which I have installed linux. In the process I (intentionally) deleted all partitions as shipped including the mediadirect partition. Everything is fine, except now, if I press the mediadirect button when the machine is off, it fails to start mediadirect (of course, I removed uit). That's fine. BUT it also clobbers the partition table preventing the machine from booting. I would really just like to disable this button, but there appears to be no option to do that in the Bios setup. Is there anyway to do so?

PETER345 · Answer

Did you try rewriting the MBR? That might kill it. Strangely, I deleted the extra Dell partitions and installed Linux (dual boot with XP) and Media direct still works. Peter

Wunderspud · Answer

Well, when I installed linux, I chose to have grub write to the MBR, if that's what you mean? When I press the mediadirect button when the machine is off, the (bios stored) MediaDirect image comes up, then there's an error message (I forget what) and I get the grub prompt. nothing boots at that point. Starting from a Live CD and running fdisk shows that the first partition type has been relabelled to W95/FAT32, and the partitions are out of order. If I use fdisk to delete all partitions and then reboot the laptop, it seems to recover the old partition table as long as there were no extended partitions present.

Linux General

Disabling Mediadirect button

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