Dell media.direct starting

[stevenamills]

this must be my day for weird stuff.

A customer just left a Dell laptop that is getting a BSOD on boot. Actually, when the computer is first starring the Dell media direct starts and then it gets a blue screen showing a registry corruption. If I try to start in safe mode it also gives me a blue screen and if I go to the OS selection page you only charge is "XP embedded".

When I boot using UBCDWin I can see all of the files on the system partition. Right now I am checking the disk surface.

Obviously, the boot process is not getting to the system partition. All I can think of is a corrupted boot.ini file, but there are possibly other answers.

As anyone seen this before?

Thanks!

 

[14049752]

I've seen something similar. You can probably use Boot Magic to set it to boot to the Windows partition.

In my case, we had a customer who's system wouldn't power on with the power button, but would with the media direct button. He didn't want to pay to fix it, so we just wiped the media direct partition and left the windows partition.

 

[stevenamills]

Conclusion -

I wish I understood how this happened. I guess I'll just have to accept what I always tell clients "there is no black box". Anyway, the partition containing the Windows installation was marked as inactive. After resetting the partition and rebuilding the master boot record everything seems fine.

It's a mystery to me.