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Nvidia SATA, Itunes and Vista woes

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I had my first blue screen of death couple of days ago on my Vista box. All I was doing is to drag and drop some movies to my Itunes 7.3.

I also noticed, although the encodings are done with same settings, it will only import only couple of the movies, the rest will not import. I was going insane :). As a test, I copied one to my wife's computer, running XP, and voila it imported fine. So I knew it wasn't the files.

After a brief research, I found that there is a known issue with Nvidia Nforce4 SATA drivers for Vista and Itunes. Who'd have thought. At the bottom of one article from Apple Support, it says:

"Some customers using computers containing NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA (SATA) controllers may experience unexpected behavior when playing videos in iTunes on Windows Vista from a SATA hard drive. iTunes may unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive or the computer may unexpectedly reboot or show a blue screen. Standard IDE hard disks are unaffected by this issue. If your computer contains a standard IDE hard disk, you can copy your video files to that disk and play those copies of the files in iTunes or QuickTime Player. NVIDIA is investigating the issue."

The resolution wouldn't work for me, as I am using a Shuttle box and I didn't have space for IDE drive. I continued my research and it turns out if you rollback your drivers to Microsoft's "Standard Dual Channel IDE Controller" and reboot your computer, it will be fine.

After the reboot, no more BSOD, all the files imported just fine. It is unbelievable. At least, for now I have a solution till Nvidia and Itunes get their act together.

Posted 7/12/2007 3:00:00 AM @ 09:36:00 | Sems

Thanks. I don't know how to "rollback" drivers, but I did search for other IDE controllers, and found one from HP that seems to work fine. We'll see if this continues to be the case. Anyway, I wanted to let you know your post was EXTREMELY HELPFUL. I don't know why HP has gotten further coming up with a solution than NVIDIA, but I'm glad they did.

Posted by Russ (email) on 7/19/2007 3:00:00 AM

You are most welcome. FYI, you can go to Settings - Control Panel - Device Manager - expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers - find the controller, right click and there you should see the option to roll back.

Posted by Sems on 7/19/2007 3:00:00 AM