[Gllug] Extremely strange disk imaging problem.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 21/01/11 23:06, Nix wrote:
> 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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Yes, it seems they have seen the light here, no doubt as a result of an
sharp increase in warranty returns! I had another Dell in yesterday with
the dreaded "media direct" button so I had a look at the hex dump of
it's LBA-3 just to see if it looked the same as the problem machine I
had in the other day and it was completely empty. Indeed when I took a
look at its partition table "media direct" was a bog standard extended
partition so they've clearly (and thankfully) done an about turn on this
now and stopped messing with the HPA :)

As for why they came up with such an strange and awful system in the
first place I can only hazard a guess... 1.7Gb isn't enough space to
store any useful amount of video content so it was probably some lame
mechanism for trying to hide the DVD decoders decryption keys.

Roger.
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