If you happen to have a Dell Inspiron E1505 or similar laptop with Dell's MediaDirect 2, you could end up with a big problem after you upgrade a hard drive. I recently had this experience, so I thought I'd share the issue and resolution with everyone.

The issue stems from the MediaDirect button that is on this particular series of Dell Laptops. It's a great idea, just hit a button and get into a quick-booting environment where you can listen to music and look at pictures. It really fails in its implementation. Essentially, it uses a hidden section of your hard drive in conjunction with some settings in the BIOS to pull this off. The issue is that the drive's capacity must be hard set in the drive to make that hidden partition work, so if you use software like Acronis or Ghost to clone the disk, you won't get very far.

Here's a quick rundown of how I got around it:

• Clone drive one to one (don't expand the partitions).
• Clear sector 4 (LBA 3 = sector 4) with GPartEd:
  • dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 seek=3 conv=notrunc
• Run Capacity Repair utility from Windows XP machine
• Reboot with drive in that machine
• Delete last partition with Disk Manangement
• Insert drive in laptop, boot into Windows to check size
• boot into GPartEd and expand partition
• reboot, chkdsk, reboot
• Check for size.