Dell Media Direct and Linux

[gold_finger]

But (there seems always to be a but...) I have looked at the disk partitions on the laptop.  It seems already to have four partitions:  a 118MB FAT "EISA" (which I believe has something to do with Dell's Recovery/Restore);  the C drive of 227GB NTFS which is the system partition and is doubtless where Windows XP resides along with all my files; then an "Extended Partition" of 2.50GB FAT32 which has no drive letter but is labelled Media Direct and logical drive;  and finally another 3.00GB FAT32 partition labelled "unknown".

I've never heard of that "Media Direct" partition before, so I looked it up and found this description.  According to that site, this is the purpose of the Media Direct partition:

MediaDirect enables you to watch DVD movies, slideshows, or listen to music without having to boot the complete XP operating system.

I don't know about anyone else, but that sounds like a relatively useless and unnecessary thing to install on a hard drive.  You apparently never use it, so you obviously won't miss it when it's gone.

This button apparently messes with, or bypasses, the Master Boot Record.

The basic understanding of it that I get is that the button is just programmed in a way to skip to directly booting that partition.

The good news is that if you are really VERY clever with Linux, you can tweak a dual boot arrangement so as to use that special button instead to boot up Linux.

While that may be possible, it's completely unnecessary.

The bad news is that it is hard if not impossible to remove Dell Media Direct cleanly and totally, and if it remains and you aren't careful, that button can mess up the MBR and/or the "grub" and you end up in infinitely deep trouble.

I'm fairly certain your worries here are overblown -- almost certainly caused by reading accounts by people who had no idea what they were doing.  I'm relatively certain that you'll be able to get rid of the partition and equally confident that once that is done, pushing the button will do absolutely nothing from that point forward.  The button is set to look for and boot from a specific partition.  If that partition is gone, it won't find anything to boot from and that will be the end of it.  (Now that I've said that, your computer will probably make a fool out of me and self destruct instead.  :o  Hopefully not.)

You should be able to get rid of that partition and install Linux Lite.  If you already have or have created a Windows recovery CD/DVD (normally there's a way to do that from within Windows), then you can even get rid of the recovery partition if you want to.

To give us a better look at the drive and the partitions, boot up with LL DVD.  Open GParted -- Menu -> System -> Partition Drives.  Let it load picture of the hard drive and take a screenshot of the window.  (Use "PrtScn" button or go to Menu -> Accessories -> Screenshot.)  Post that screenshot back here for us to see.  Close GParted when done.

Then open a terminal -- forth icon to right of Menu button.  Enter the following command, then copy/paste the output back here for us to see:

Code:

sudo fdisk -l

We'll be able to give precise directions on how to proceed from info shown by both of above.

While waiting for response back, to prepare for installation do the following:
*  Create Windows recovery disk(s) if you don't have them already
*  Defragment the C: drive
*  If Windows XP has the built-in ability to shrink the C: drive after defragmenting is done, then shrink it to make room for the LL installation.  Don't create any partitions -- just shrink C:.  If you can't do that in Win XP, don't worry about it -- we'll do it with GParted later.
*  Make backup copies of any important data files you don't want to lose.  (Precautionary measure just in case you make a drastic mistake or something like a power outage happens while you're in the middle of installing.)

P.s.  If, for some reason, you want to keep the Media Direct partition, that may be possible but I can't say for sure how well the procedure will go and that LL will be able to boot properly.  I say that not because of the Media Direct partition itself, but because we will need to enclose the LL installation within the Windows created extended partition that Media Direct is on.  Have read about possible problems with trying to install Linux on partitions created by Windows.