Still (6 months down the line) cannot get the sound / modem to BOTH work in Ubuntu. Don’t know enough about compiling my own drivers to get them working as they share the same chip, apparently.

Didn’t know about the button problem! Never use it, but my response “oh sh*t!”

Machine is running fine so I’m not gonna touch. Thanks for the warning – came across this post purely by accident!

Axel

I found a fix for the Dell Self-destruct-direct (MediaDirect) button problem.

A little background info might be in order though. What the Dell MediaDirect button (next to the power button and has a house icon on it similar to an internet browsers “Home” button) does when the hard drive is partitioned in a way that it does not expect (aka, linux installed) it rewrites the partition table that it thinks it should have. Your partition table is essentially like the table of contents pages in a book with 100 billion pages, without it your screwed.

What we’re going to do here is offer a way to disable the button if you don’t care about the data on the drive (like right after a fresh install) OR a way to recover your partition table with a nifty program called testdisk.

Plan A – Disable Destruct Button
You can low-level format your hard drive to permanently remove the danger the button poses to your future data, because you _will_ loose ALL data currently on your drive. Issue the following command from a live CD/DVD booted system.

****WARNING USE ONLY FROM LIVE CD/DVD******
****WARNING WILL DESTORY ALL DATA ON DISK*******
Code:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

The above command writes zeros in every sector of your hard drive, aka “Zeroing the drive”. Zeroing the drive has been known to overwrite the HPA (Host Protected Area) of the hard drive where the MediaDirect partition is hidden on the drive. Afterwards, pressing the self-destruct button will harmlessly show the MediaDirect splash screen and then boot GRUB.

The above came from Skuzniak here

Plan B – RECOVER YOUR DATA.
If you have pressed the dreaded MediaDirect button and now have a very expensive paper weight for a laptop, FEAR NOT! testdisk to the rescue!

1) Boot up your live CD/DVD (like the one you used to install from).

2) Copy the additional repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file on your live CD/DVD session. The live CD isn’t mean to install packages/programs to since it is erased when your reboot, however, if needed you can install a small amount of extra data. Like repair utilities. You can find instructions on how to do this HERE.

3) Issue the following command to update your repository list after you changed your sources.list file and also install the precious data recovery utility “testdisk”, as well as run testdisk after it’s installed creating a testdisk.log file of all it’s actions in the directory you issue the following command from.
Code:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install testdisk && sudo testdisk /log

4) Use the arrow keys to select your laptop hard drive. If you are using the live CD/DVD you should see two hard drives.

/dev/hda (the live CD virtual drive) and /dev/sda (your laptop hard drive)

To “Proceed”, tap the “Enter/Return” key when you’ve selected the appropriate hard drive.

5) Tap the “Enter/Return” key again on the next screen to select “Intel/PC” partition type.

6) Tap the “Enter/Return” key again on the next screen to “Analyse” (spelled the way it is in the program) your hard disk and search for your lost partitions.

7) This screen shows the screwed up partition table.. just tap the “Enter/Return” key again to “Proceed”

If you’re lucky you’ll see two or three partitions (If you let Ubuntu install configure your disk for you). Something like what you see below:
Code:

* Linux 0 1 1 18752 254 63 301266882
L Linux Swap 18753 0 1 19456 254 63 11309760

Tap the “Enter/Return” key again to “Proceed”

9) Now tap the right arrow key twice and tap the “Enter/Return” key to write the recovered partition table. Confirm it by taping the “Y” key and then the “Enter/Return” key.

10) Reboot your computer and take the live CD/DVD out.

NOTE: I had to do this twice for it to work for some reason, but after that, my precious Kubuntu booted up normal just like it used to without one file missing!

THANK YOU NICOLAE and PSEUDOMANCER!