Hey all, Question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO DISABLE OR SAFELY PHYSICALLY REMOVE THAT STINKING MEDIA DIRECT BUTTON ON A LAPTOP? I recently formatted a Vostro 1500 laptop with xp pro. this laptop has a media direct button, and of course, USE to have media direct installed. I deleted that partition and the recovery one too, and put XP on the single partition of 160GB. However, and I am sure some of you have experienced this already, when you hit the media direct button with the machine powered OFF, it immediately overwrites the mbr of the primary partition (XP partition in this case) which of course disallows booting into XP after that. luckily I took a full image of the drive once I had XP 100% configured the way I wanted it. so I just re-imaged the drive and was back up and running in 8 minutes. Obviously I don't want to have to do that every time that button would be touched by a user somewhere. these are incredibly great laptops in every conceivable way EXCEPT for that really bad idea of Media Direct functionality. I'll pass on whatever they were thinking we'd all use that for. I read somewhere that the only way it works is when the laptop is CLOSED and you use the little control buttons on the front of the laptop with another monitor. uhh, guys? this is a laptop intended to be a standalone machine for all its uses and purposes. not as a little media jukebox or some crap like that. get a frick'n ipod if you want that. I don't believe these can be ordered WITHOUT THE BUTTON either. Thanks for any leads on killing the MD idea on these laptops. Chuck

Try a Google search for "media direct button". Looks like there are some fixes that are worth a try.

Hint 1: When Dell preinstalls MediaDirect before shipping a new computer, it is installed in a special part of the hard disk called the "Host-Protected Area" (HPA). The HPA is more deeply hidden than the other "hidden" partitions Dell uses. Hint 2: Some motherboards has incorporated the HPA feature in the BIOS Now combine hints 1 & 2 together, you can infer from it that Dell's Media Direct button is non-disable (without some sort of BIOS flash) and you've got to learn to live with this proprietary laptop. i_Xp/VistaUser

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