Dell complaints

[sqrach]

It would have been nice if Dell attempted to warn me and anyone else about a serious issue they simply call a "Phenomenon"

With my laptop and a few others they have something called media direct. I've never used it but I think it is a little button that opens up media center, something else I never use.
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm

Nobody can solve this so I welcome any suggestions but I'm sure I've tried it. It's beyond annoying but since I had no idea about it I cloned my drive to my new drive. It actually allows this entire process but after you try to use it you'll find the blue screen of death.
What happens after is that you basically have no option but to write zeros to the drive only the drive is now truncated exactly the same size as your old drive and there is absolutely nothing you can do. Trust me I've tried everything. I bought a 320Gb drive to update my 80Gb (73.13) drive but it's now forever stuck at 73.13.
"No amount of recloning, reformatting, repartitioning, or rejumpering will get the BIOS to recognize the full size of the disk."

Isn't that awesome
They sent me new installation discs which don't have everything I need (such as ... the ability to view any resolution below 1600x1280)
This still would have been great if I had the discs before I lost my 75% of my hard drive and wasted 50$ on an enclosure.
You really need to install media direct again because if you don't and should accidentally press that button you will royally destroy your drive.

It is garbage.
You'd think they would have tried to tell customers about it.


Anybody else have this happen?
I lost 250Gb

[HellResident]

Yup, media direct is junk. Your hard drive though is probably fine if correctly repaired.

First, what media direct is. It's a seperate partition on your hard disk that has a "mini windows" that is designed, as the name suggests , to play media files such as mp3's or avi's or dvd's. It isnt affected by installations of software on your system, because it's a seperate windows in a separate partition of your drive.

When the small button to the left of your power button is pressed, it switches the pointer on the partition table from one partition to the other.

You can install windows without media direct ( or boat anchor as the techs at Dell routinely call it) .
The system doesnt work well, or properly, so customers routinely lose access to thei real windows. This happens when they press the house symbol media direct button and it screws up the partiton pointing. Unfortunately there is no way to "disable" the media direct button. So if you accidentally press it on a system that doesnt have the media direct partition, you system becomes unuseable until a reinstall of windows is performed. Nice Dhell.....really nice.

You can return your hard disk to normal with the debug command. Instructions are found here :

http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/HardDrive.htm

( note it describes problems with SATA drives. I've done this dozens of times and seen no such issues so it may be that information is incorrect.

Either way, if your drive is showing at only 80 gig and is a 320, then that's a defect, you could always call up support and say it's defective.


HellResident

[Dutton]

I am launching a class action lawsuit against Dell because of Media Direct. I never even use that partitioned service, but an automatic update to the softwared last Wed. caused my computer to get stuck in that partition when I restarted (applying the updates) on Thursday morning. The Media Direct update encountered the OS security (password needed to log on) and not being able to get past it, locked up my system so that it couldn't get out of that partition. After nearly 7 hours on the phone with Dell reps, trying this and that, I finally had to reinstall my OS.

I spent all of Friday trying to reload everything onto my machine. It didn't help that so many people apparently had crashes on Thursday that on Friday the DellDataSafe service was downloading at 56k on my 100Mps cable connection. They told me their engineers were working on the low server speed problem and would get back to me when it was fixed.

If you want to participate in this lawsuit, follow me on Twitter and I will follow you back, so we can then DM each other. I'm on as Aspiratech.

[YoheBear]

MediaDirect's button is a sign of DELL's arrogance. No wonder they are losing market share and have little loyalty amongst current users. One would think that with all the problems this dubious software has caused over several years, based on extensive sites and posting on the Internet, it would have been fixed long ago.

MediaDirect has no legitimate purpose on business-oriented computers; especially since (a) you cannot disable the MediaDirect button, (b) if you accidentally do press the button, MediaDirect hijacks* your computer and prevents you from getting to the original OS, and (c) DELL gives no documentation on how to turn the damnable software off, so you have to make a totally needless call to their tech support.

Some solutions have been written elsewhere on this site and on the Internet. One solution give to me by a DELL chat support person for a Vostro 1500 laptop. Turn off computer and wait several seconds to discharge any residual settings, press and hold MediaDirect button for at least 10 seconds, then press the PowerOn button. Voila, your base Operating System appears. To prevent this from happening again, tape a piece of thin cardboard over the MediaDirect button, to prevent further use. (Boy, does that look elegant when using your laptop in a conference or Board room!)

* MediaDirect is part of that super hidden partition DELL puts on their machines. It also usurps your normal BIOS boot sequence--real nasty.

[Dutton]

Thanks YoheBear for your message. I think it will probably help some people, but my DMD problem was different. I never hit the button. Dell sent out an automatic update to the software and I guess because I had never configured DMD in the first place, the next morning when I restarted the machine and it tried to apply the newly installed update it encountered a missing password and couldn't launch DMD. The chkdsk utility identified the problem as a bad "patch" which is probably what they call automatic updates to the software, but there was no amount of finagling we could do to get it out of the DMD partition on the hard drive. We even tried launching DMD with its button, which did launch after several restarts of the machine and chkdsk repairs, but even then exiting that app would not allow a restart into the other partition. Had to just wipe the machine and reinstall the factory settings... which of course, still include that pesky DMD partition. I have turned off automatic updates so I am sure to never have that happen again.