Media Direct cannot access HD?

ChaosKye · 07-17-2007, 11:12 AM

Its interesting, when I tried to start up Media Direct Express for the first time, I got a message stating "Dell Media Direct Express cannot access your Harddrive. This may be because you have accessed Microsoft Bitlocker (Driver Encryption)."

I don't see how the heck this could be the case, since isn't it only available on Microsoft Vista Ultimate/Business?

The only thing I can think that may have happened is the fact that I had partitioned my HD when I did a clean install, and maybe that messed something up. If thats the case, does anyone have any suggestions of programs to check/change them from within windows?

EDIT:\\ Ei... actually, now when I try to start up the computer w/ Vista (pressing power button), its just going to the Media Direct screen instead... Now I can't get Vista to run. I have a feeling this is going to be very annoying

thegsrguy · 07-17-2007, 11:20 AM

BitLocker is for Enterprise & Ultimate, it's not available on Business Edition.

You messed with the MBR when partitioning, and Media Direct doesn't like that.

ChaosKye · 07-17-2007, 11:28 AM

Does anyone have any bright ideas on how I could fix this? The only think I can think of is use the recovery option and try fdisk /mbr

thegsrguy · 07-17-2007, 11:41 AM

You need to restore the original Dell MBR. Try running dsrfix (Google for it).

ChaosKye · 07-17-2007, 01:05 PM

I got it to work using the recovery option, so I didnt get to test your method but thanks still!

garsh0p · 07-21-2007, 04:25 AM

i'm having the EXACT same problem after a clean vista install.

how did you fix the media direct bitlocker problem?

also, i pressed the media direct button again to get back to vista.

PhoenixFx · 07-21-2007, 04:39 AM

One way is to reinstall Windows again. Boot and partition the HDD using MD installation DVD . This will create a new partition (prepare the Hard Disk) for MD, then install Windows and afterwards run MD installer from Windows to actually install the program on the newly created MD partition.

I know it is lot of work to reinstall Windows again, but this may be the only way to recover from it......

jbizzler · 07-25-2007, 11:24 PM

Aha, I have this as well. You can boot Vista once again by using the MediaDirect button, and it will be corrected after that. But any time you try and use MediaDirect again, it will go back to the beginning of your problem. I'm looking for a solution.

copperlab · 07-28-2007, 06:18 PM

I am having this same problem. Have an xps m1210 that origianlly came with xp. I did a clean install of vista. Now media direct button only loads the vista partition, not the media direct partition.

I booted to a dos startup disk and ran fdisk. It seems that all partitions are there (50mb repair partition, 10gb recovery partition, 100gb os partition, and 1.5gb media direct partition). I tried running fdisk /mbr but it said innsufficient memory. Also, it seems that vista writes its own different type of MBR that can't be edited by fdisk. I also tried to run dsrfix, but this left the computer innoperable (I had to run vista repair at startup to have it rewrite the MBR). In fdisk I could see that the start sectors for the os partition and the media direct partition were exactly the same (in my case 1028). This is the problem...But I don't know how to fix the MBR under vista. Can anyone help?

imzomnia · 11-18-2007, 11:12 AM

So anyone find a workable solution with having to reinstall everything?