(sorry for necro, but I think I should share something after getting alot out of these forums lately)
I had a similar issue a month or two ago with my Dell Vostro & MediaDirect (Version 3), I had previously removed all partitions, and made a tri boot situation using grub. One evening I just reached behind to turn my laptop on and hit the media direct button. Unable to boot. Thought it was fine, until I booted normally. NTLDR not found. A quick boot from a live CD showed that the partition structures had been changed. The 45 MB partition, and the 3 GB MediaDirect partitions had returned (this is the way it is w/ my laptop), with a solid partition in the middle. After a few hours of tinkering I came to the following conclusions
1) If It can't find its partitions the way it wants it, it rewrites the table, ie. adios data.
2) It modifies partition flags directly, un-hiding and re-hiding the media partition and changing the main OS partition. It does a few more things, but I don't really recall.
3) It Always, always assumes the OS partition is NTFS. It sets its partition flags to certain settings for MD boot, then back to standard NTFS.
So, I had come across a few things that might help
1) (My favorite and currently in use one) If you're NEVER, EVER going to use the media direct, pop the plastic off where the power button is (guide is on Dell) and rip that plastic button out. The actual button will be further down, but with no plastic to push it, its useless (unless you have a pen). Since my Vostro is black, black electrical tap is barely visible.
2) I never bothered to test this, but if you were to keep the media direct and the 45mb pre partition, then you may want to consider the following: A small NTFS partition, very small, with the NTLDR setup on it and using that to boot to your particular linux distro (you couldn't use grub, and would probably have to be after the 45mb dell partition). Then, after using the rest of the space for linux, and knowing what partition # it is, there is a program on the Dell Media Direct cd, something like "rmbr", its a windows program (might have to use a windows boot disk for this, don't think it'll run in wine or anything
). Using this, you are supposed to be able to point out what partition number is your primary NTFS, and which is your MD partition. "rmbr 1 4" would set its "primary NTFS location" as partition #1, and MD Partition as #4
Hope this helps.
Linear Mode
