M1330: A brief History of BIOS Revisions

[jnewell]

Flashing the bios is easy and fast and no data gets lost. Somone should install it and try. I'd try but I killed MD and the recovery partition.

[traveller]

Flashing the BIOS is easy and fast...

Flashing a BIOS has certainly gotten safer over the years, but I still wouldn't flash the BIOS "just for fun"... .

My request though doesn't require anyone to flash the BIOS - my guess is that 1/2 of 1330 owners have A09 or a higher revision installed and I'm just asking one of them to check what happens when they press the Media button (in power-off mode)...

[7oby]

Anyone have A09+ and can still access Dell's MD partition (& the residing XP OS) with the press of the MD button from a powered-off state...

Yes, works for me. My Notebook came with A07 and I had every BIOS till A14 on it. It always worked and still does, while I'm on A14.

What you may want to try:
. deinstall MD from Windows (and I think it will also discard contents of the MD partition - not only the files of the Windows installation)
. reinstall MD from within Windows (and it will overwrite date on MD partition)
. hopefully your computer will boot MD from power state off

[traveller]

Yes, works for me.

Thanks for the feedback & suggestion. Makes me wonder what happened to the original installation & how a motherboard swap could possibly affect it...

I have 3.3 installed and I believe it's the same version as the one shipped (on Dell's CDs).

[7oby]

I have 3.3 installed as well.

Yes, a motherboard swap can affect MD functionality. At times of MD 2.x the information where the MD partition is found was found in the first sectors of your harddrive. This behavior changed in MD 3.x. And I'm pretty convinced this information is now present in some NVRam embedded in the Mainboard.

It should be possible to fix it with the tool RMBR.EXE contained on the MD 3.3 disk. It's usage is as follows:

E:\DellKit>rmbr /?
rmbr usage is as below:


rmbr VenderName XPProPartitionNO XPEmbeddedPartitionNO
VenderName              available values: DELL HP Generic SPF Demo
XPProPartitionNO        available values: 1 2 3 4
XPEmbeddedPartitionNO   available values: 1 2 3 4
Example
rmbr Generic 1 2

If you try that one be sure to know how to fix your vista partition in case it messes up. e.g. by means of the Vista repair console or Gparted and setting the correct active partition.

Anyway: The default Dell installation has Vista on Partition No. 2 and MD in a logical partition. In my case MD is partition No. 7. Although rmbr help says only values of 1 - 4 are valid I have read some contractionary information about this issue. Any some people this one helped:

rmbr.exe DELL 2 7

You may want to try different partition numbers. But the partition numbers are the ones you assign to the two buttons.

[traveller]

...was found in the first sectors of your harddrive ... now present in some NVRam embedded in the Mainboard...

Wow, that's quite an interesting theory! Too bad there isn't some way (command) to enumerate the existing partitions. As it stands, MD & the 2.5GB space it takes up isn't worth risking my environment.

I have to wonder how you managed to get up to seven partitions... . when I use Window's own Disk management tool I see the following:
110MB: "EISA Configuration"
10Gb: NTFS, Primary Part. (Recovery)
136GB NTFS OS (System, boot, etc)
2.5GB Primary Partition.

so if I were to map the physical locations the cmd would be:
rmbr DELL 3 4

But this is actually another topic and I've already noted a few threads on MD and dual-boot + MD button, etc. so thanks for your input & I'll give your suggestions some thought

[7oby]

Too bad there isn't some way (command) to enumerate the existing partitions.

Actually there is:
. open a command prompt
. diskpart
. (a new window will pop up)
. select disk 0
. list partition

The output will be something like this:

  Partition ###   Typ              Größe    Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    OEM                 47 MB    32 KB
  Partition 2    Primär              32 GB    47 MB
  Partition 0    Erweitert           80 GB    32 GB
  Partition 3    Logisch             46 GB    32 GB
  Partition 4    Logisch              9 GB    79 GB
  Partition 6    Logisch           3906 MB    88 GB
  Partition 7    Logisch             18 GB    92 GB
  Partition 5    Logisch           2055 MB   110 GB

Sorry, I've a german installation. The interesting part is: While the order of the partitions listed corresponds to the physical location on the hardrive (LBA starting blocks increasing), however the partition no. corresponds to the logical numbering (required by RMBR).

As you can see: The last partition is the MD partition in my case which is 2055MB and at position 110GB. However it's logical number is 5. This is due to partitions in extended partitions being lined up in a list. And within this list the MD partitions comes before others.

In your case it seems much simpler: You don't seem to have an extended partition. This looks good to me, but you might want to verify with diskpart:

rmbr DELL 3 4

[traveller]

...you might want to verify with diskpart

Vielen dank

Also, so schaut's aus (So, this is how things look):

1 OEM 110MB
2 Primary 10GB
3 Primary 136GB
0 Extended 2560MB
4 Logical 2559MB

But of course now I'm totaly confused as to which values to use with rmbr...

Btw, you were right about a mobo replacement's effect on MD:
"When the machine is off, pressing the power button turns the computer on. Pressing the MediaDirect button instead turns the computer on and additionally sets a bit in the bios cmos registers."

[traveller]

...totaly confused as to which values to use...

Well...
I executed rmbr with 3 4 and this caused the MD button to load the MD screen and then freeze. The power button still booted into VISTA. So I then tried 3 5.

I first tried the MD button and it loaded the MD screen and then nothing. I then used the power button and got the error msg that no boot record was found on the internal disk....

I loaded up the VISTA CD, went into recovery and in a cmd window, ran the BOOTREC /FIXMBR. The pgm came back with a "successfully executed". Rebooted but still no boot record found...

I also tried the BOOTREC /FIXBOOT parm but that returned an error ("not found" or similar).

what's my next course of action? Needless to say, I'm no longer concerned about getting the MD partition to work, I just want VISTA back without restoring or installing it...

[7oby]

I first tried the MD button and it loaded the MD screen and then nothing. I then used the power button and got the error msg that no boot record was found on the internal disk....

Try pressing MD button a second time from power state off. This often works, since behind the scenes the functionality of MD button swaps the partitions around. Since you're german this is the only site I know of that talks about it:
http://www.servicemensch.info/Online...ARTIKEL,8.html

After you pressed the MD button a second time the normal power button should work.

what's my next course of action?

Use GParted LiveCD and boot it.

Now verify if you are stuck in the intermediate partition table (that's the third one in the above link and you can tell by the partition ID which is 0C and contained in partition slot one). If you are stuck in the intermediate partition table, then shutdown notebook. Power on with MD (it won't work, never mind). Restart GParted Live CD again and have a look at the partition table. Does it have Dell Utility recovered?

If yes go ahead and mark the 3rd partition active. That's the one containing Vista. Hopefully after that Vista will launch again.

I do know sufficiently about MD and certainly didn't mean to corrupt your filesystem. Hope you/we can figure that quickly.

7oby