iTunes/Vista/Nvidia Update

[Jeremy Charette]

Last week I finally discovered the cause of all my iTunes BSOD woes: crappy Nvidia SATA drivers. Well, last night I checked Windows Update, and lo and behold, newly available optional Nvidia nForce 430 SATA drivers! Installed them, rebooted, re-installed iTunes, and...all seemed to be working fine. No BSOD! So I went to bed.

I woke up to a dead PC. The motherboard won't recognize the SATA hard drive as a system disk, and when it does, all I get is an error message which says "to re-start the system press ctrl-alt-delete". Brilliant. Thanks Nvidia. Nice to know you support your customers, and Windows Vista. Methinks it's time to go back to XP.

I'm at the office right now, and I wasn't able to find my Vista DVD before I left this morning. Will report back later once I determine whether I can restore Vista to a previously known good configuration. Vista's great when it works. Emphasis on when.

[Filip Norrgard]

Nvidia RAID "conflicting" with iTunes? Who would have thought that was possible? :roll:

[Vincent Ferrari]

It's astonishing how many "iTunes" problems have been fixed by other people...

And the weirdest part is it's always something you'll never think of. Serial ATA RAID drivers? Who the hell would even think of that?

[Jeremy Charette]

It has to do with the way that iTunes accesses the hard drive when doing multiple simultaneous read/writes. The nForce southbridge driver screws up the translation somewhere along the way and corrupts the data on the drive, causing the BSOD. Only seems to happen with iTunes however. There are other known issues with Nvidia chipset drivers, including slow SATA transfer speeds and data corruption. There's no fix in sight from Nvidia, nor any acknowledgement from them of the existence of the problem.

I'd like to ship my PC to them and say "here, YOU fix it!". :roll:

[bcre8v2]

Hi Jeremy,

At this stage it sounds more like a BIOS "re-configuration" issue. Many MotherBoard driver updates (including RAID, SATA controller) may affect the core configuration. VIA 4-in-1 were prime examples as well as some ASUS MoBo patches.
After each patch, you would required to "verify" MoBo settings (actually reset or re-adjust).
SATA, RAID, IDE are notorious for these resets.

I wish you luck all in the name of iTunes.
I'll reserve Nvidia-Vista judgement for another year. :lol:

-Steve

[Jeremy Charette]

Nope, that's the first thing I checked this morning, went into BIOS Setup, and double-checked all the config settings. Everything was the same. Also, it rebooted twice last night with no trouble at all. I think there's something wrong with Vista itself, I'm going to try rolling back to pre-driver install last night and see if I can jump start Vista again.

This is so incredibly frustrating. I'd gotten used to the convenience of having my podcasts automatically download to my iPod, and listening to them in the car. I haven't been able to do that in months now.

See Jason, you're not the only cursed computer builder! :lol:

[Jason Dunn]

Man. Ugly. Problems like this suck because they're so hard to nail down. If it's RAID that's causing the problems, what about just giving up on RAID? Were you running RAID 0 or RAID 1?

[Jeremy Charette]

That's the beauty of it, RAID was completely disabled. Just a single 750 GB Seagate Barracuda. Which I believe is now completely hosed. Can't even boot off it, and the Vista install DVD won't recognize the Vista installation on the hard drive.

:bad-words:

[Filip Norrgard]

Can't even boot off it, and the Vista install DVD won't recognize the Vista installation on the hard drive.
Have you tried looking if there's anything left on the drive using Knoppix or Ubuntu? You might get lucky and see that there's something left to rescue, maybe even the whole Vista installation.

Tons of good luck with that. Seems like you will need it... ;)

[The Yaz]

Are you sure it was the sata drivers? Of the three machines I've tried to run Vista and iTunes on, the only one that's been successful is a simple Emachine with a Celeron processor running Hyperthreading.

I discussed this with a Bestbuy tech and he believes iTunes needs to run through a single processor to be stable. I don't understand why that would be. While my other computers are 1st gen dual core, I haven't seen any problems with other applicatons.

I though it would be worthwhile to mention it...

[Jeremy Charette]

Well, whatever the problem, the hard drive is hosed. Just makes a clicking noise now and gets extremely hot.

Once again, thanks Nvidia!

I'm going to return the drive to Seagate and see if they can recover anything off of it (after trying the basics myself), the only thing on there that's critical really is my Outlook PST file, which I have an old version of from about 4-6 weeks ago. So basically, I lost a few weeks of emails. No big whoop. What's more pressing to me is the time I'm going to waste setting up a new XP installation on a spare hard drive. These are all hours much better spent doing other things.

Hi ho hi ho, back to XP I go. :roll:

[Jason Dunn]

Can't even boot off it, and the Vista install DVD won't recognize the Vista installation on the hard drive.

Does the Vista repair function do anything? Or it can't even see the Vista install to fix it? That's REALLY bizarre...

[Jason Dunn]

Well, whatever the problem, the hard drive is hosed. Just makes a clicking noise now and gets extremely hot. Once again, thanks Nvidia!

Waitasecond...you think iTunes+SATA drivers killed the hard drive? That's bizarre - I've never heard of such a thing before. What's the theory, that the driver put the hard drive into a tizzy and it overheated causing damage or something?

...the only thing on there that's critical really is my Outlook PST file, which I have an old version of from about 4-6 weeks ago.

Data loss sucks...it's so important to have a daily backup of all your important files. If you have more than one computer, using Foldershare (http://www.foldershare.com) is a free and easy way to mirror data from one machine to another.

[Jeremy Charette]

Waitasecond...you think iTunes+SATA drivers killed the hard drive? That's bizarre - I've never heard of such a thing before. What's the theory, that the driver put the hard drive into a tizzy and it overheated causing damage or something?

Bingo. When I was troubleshooting it last night, the drive was hotter than H E double hockey sticks. Could barely touch it. Now it just goes "tick tick tick tick tick" endlessly. It's dead.

The stupid thing is I'm in the Windows Home Server Beta, and could have prevented this whole mess if I'd actually set it up. Oy.

[Jeremy Charette]

Does the Vista repair function do anything? Or it can't even see the Vista install to fix it? That's REALLY bizarre...

Vista repair wont' even see the drive.

[Jason Dunn]

Bingo. When I was troubleshooting it last night, the drive was hotter than H E double hockey sticks. Could barely touch it. Now it just goes "tick tick tick tick tick" endlessly. It's dead.

Holy crap. That's brutal.

The stupid thing is I'm in the Windows Home Server Beta, and could have prevented this whole mess if I'd actually set it up. Oy.

Dang. Life lesson right there. I wasn't a backup freak until I lost data (like most people I think).

[Jeremy Charette]

The drive is in the freezer right now. Gonna give it a shot tomorrow and see what I can recover (if anything), then it's back to Seagate.

Second time I've been bit by lost data, when I had no reason to be. Laptop got stolen last year, and the stupid thing is, two weeks prior I had been to an HP press event and was given a 60 GB external backup drive. Neglected to use it, and voila, laptop stolen. Got into the Windows Home Server beta a few months ago, neglected to set it up, and voila, massive hard drive meltdown.

Oy.

[Jonathon Watkins]

Sorry to hear that Jeremy. :( I'm just about to buy a pair of the 750Gb Seagates to run in RAID 1. I hope yours melting down was an isolated ocurence....... :?

[Jeremy Charette]

I'm sure the drive wasn't to fault. I've read of numerous reports of these Nvidia SATA drivers melting down drives, especially over on Nvidia's forums. I'll tell you this, I won't be using that motherboard with any SATA drives until I can confirm that the problem is fixed.

[Jason Eaton]

I don't think nVidia is ready for Vista in general. I had nothing but issues with the nforce 4 drivers and graphic drivers in Vista. I tossed the board into the collection of tech stuff closet and sucked it up for a gasp... Intel board.

Smooth sailing now. Not that I think Intel has a better product (it isn't a slouch mind you) it is just that they have a lot of resources and pull to make sure their items work natively with MS OS most of the time right out of the gate. Same reason I love the Apple stuff. It works without me fiddling and lets me work.

Also, have you tried the other SATA ports? Some run off different chipsets and you might have better luck getting the drive recognized.

[Jeremy Charette]

I've tried the drive in 3 different PCs, it's toast. Going back to Seagate for replacement.