While modifying my laptop’s hard drive I noticed there was a tiny partition present at the end my disk. I found the idea quite quaint, especially after Ubuntu’s installer returned an error message saying the FAT of this disk was faulty. It being near midnight I cancelled the installation and rebooted, hoping I hadn’t damaged anything crucial (like breaking the boot-sequence), whereas I didn’t really know what that plop of disk was for.

“Is it Dell specific? Does it have something to do with the recovery and diagnostic tools supplied by Dell?” After a quick Google I ended up on Dell’s own website to find out the partition belongs to another quaint application that comes factory-installed, called MediaDirect.

I had once mistaken the MediaDirect button for the power-button and my laptop booted into a custom environment that is able to play media like music and DVDs without having to fully boot into Vista. In itself a nice initiative, but in retrospect something no-one really needs.

I reckon I’ll just give it another shot and install Ubuntu anew, disregarding the error message (since the partition isn’t really necessary).