Other Norton Products

[redk9258]

I've never encountered this Dell MediaDirect. Thank goodness! I had to look it up here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_MediaDirect

It's a shame these PC manufacturers have to make things non-standard. I guess that another reason just to build my own and install Windows clean.

I just bought a HP laptop for my daughter. It's a shame all of the crapware they put on there. There is a recovery option that only installs the bare minimum software and drivers so I did it and it all seemed good. A few days went by and a popup came up wanting to validate the warranty or something. I had to go into the task scheduler and delete 3 things there! I wish I would have just installed Windows from scratch!

[redk9258]

Brian_K... The Shell Answer Man* of PCs! LOL. Great job!

*remember those commercials?

[Brian_K]

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redk9258 wrote:

*remember those commercials?

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No I don't. Maybe only shown in the US?

This is the best article I've seen on the Dell HPA. From Dan Goodell.

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.shtml

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.shtml

[redk9258]

The Shell Answer Man may have been in US only. I thought Shell was world wide.

The Dell HPA is almost like a rootkit. Seems silly to me. I guess they finally abandoned it for something a little more normal, right?

[DaveH]

Red-  HP's actually have something similar but they don't mess with the partition table like that.

I can't forget what it's called but it lets you quick start a small version of linux so it lets you play CD's and other things without having to boot windows.  My wife had a HP like that I I showed her how it worked and she thought it was pretty stupid.

She said if she just wanted to play music she would put the CD in a CD player.

Dave

[redk9258]

My Asus motherboard came with something called Express Gate. It is installed on a memory chip and not the harddrive.  I think sometimes it is installed on the harddrive. I've played around with it. I guess it would be good to be able to get online with it if you had major PC problems and couldn't get WIndows to work. I wish I could put the Ghost SRD on the chip instead of Express Gate. I would imagine it would load lightning fast!

[sfalco1957]

OK, just some followup questions now that the smoke has cleared and I have a functional machine again...

1) I assume I no longer can boot and press F11 to access the DELL restore stuff (factory preload)? I am not overly concerned about that on such an old machine anyway... I don't think I have that partition on the new drive.

2) Should I make a fresh complete backup of what the Ghost program can now see on my new HD? Or is incremental good enough?

3) What is contained in the 48MB Dell Utility partition? 

[DStain]

As soon as you can just run a backup onto an external drive, you can use a "One Time Backup" for this task.

The "OTB" eliminates any unnecessary settings and is a Full computer backup.

Make sure to highlight all the partitions on the primary drive and that will ensure your computer is safe.

Deric

[Brian_K]

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sfalco1957 wrote:

1) I assume I no longer can boot and press F11 to access the DELL restore stuff (factory preload)? I am not overly concerned about that on such an old machine anyway... I don't think I have that partition on the new drive.

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sfalco1957,

We didn't copy your restore partition because the restore partition won't work without Dell boot code. We deliberately didn't copy the Dell MBR because of the HPA.

2) Should I make a fresh complete backup of what the Ghost program can now see on my new HD? Or is incremental good enough?

Yes. Create an image of the FAT partition, once. It doesn't change so a second image at a later time isn't necessary. Create a full image of the WinXP partition. The new MBR will be copied to each image as well.

3) What is contained in the 48MB Dell Utility partition?

Diagnostics. When you see the Dell splash screen press F12 to get a boot menu. Diagnostics should be on top of the menu.

Edit... The FAT partition isn't essential but if you remove it WinXP won't boot unless you edit boot.ini.

[DaveH]

If you really want to be able to do a factory restore, you can save those image files and the recovery can be ran manually.

Inside that partition is image files made with Ghost 2003 and a restore program that either runs in DOS or windows depending on the version.

The easiest way to get the files out is to image that partition and then use Ghost explorer to extract the files out of the image.

But as already mentioned, you really shouldn't need it because instead of restoring to a factory state you can restore the system with all your programs and data with Ghost.

Red-  My wifes new laptop is an Asus now.

I bought her a copy of Ghost and I made her a bootable SDHC card using grub4dos.   By pressing the tab/esc buttons I can choose to boot to the SDHC card and boot the Ghost ISO or a few other PE disks I made her.

She leaves the card in the slot all the time and when in windows 7 it's also used for ready boost.

Dave