[Gllug] Extremely strange disk imaging problem.

[Nix]

On 21 Jan 2011, general told this:
> Andy you've cracked it, thanks a million! This _is_ a Dell machine with
> the staggeringly ill considered "Media Direct" partition and those

That's a much politer phrase than I used after reading that webpage.
What the frotz were Dell *thinking*? I mean, they already *had*
system-critical restoration stuff in perfectly normal partitions, so
they obviously weren't concerned about people 'accidentally' blowing
things away... indeed HPA MediaDirect *reduces* system stability, with
failure modes described in that webpage varying from losing part of
the MBR all the way up to losing the *system restoration partition* if
you lose power at the wrong time. And a double-rewrite of the MBR on
every startup, what could go wrong?

Does MediaDirect actually record bits of DVD into that 1.7Gb partition,
so this HPA stuff was a crazed attempt to stop people copying it?
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