If you are running Windows Vista and get this error when you try to run a QuickTime movie, there IS a fix!

Go here, scroll to the bottom of the page, and follow the instructions. You will have to download and excecute two programs, but it will solve the problem.

tanstaafl.

Well, there's your first problem, right there...

Second problem, actually.. the first problem was clearly stated:

It's clearly not working right if it gives you an "Error 46"; it's meant to be destroying your RAID arrays instead.

Peter

Holy Sh*t!!

Shortly after installing iTunes software (a temporary thing, no longer being used) I started getting a message about "Degraded RAID..." in red letters when I booted the computer. I thought one of my hard drives had failed.

Will getting rid of iTunes and QuickTime fix this? If not, what do I have to do to restore my computer to full health?

Actually... the RAID system was something my computer builder set up. I'm not that fond of RAID, preferring a backup to an external hard drive. How would I convert to that? I am already doing that -- backing up the [broken] raid to a USB drive -- but I wouldn't mind converting my D: RAID drive to independent D: and E: drives.

tanstaafl.

If it's the same as what happened to Shaun's PC at Empeg when he tried to play Quicktime files under Vista, then what's going on is that your RAID controller also mistakenly thinks that one of the drives has failed. You need to go into the BIOS and tell it that the drive is OK really; it wasn't me doing this so I can't give any more precise instructions. Then once it's rebuilt the RAID, you should go and find updated RAID controller drivers, probably on Intel's website, as it's the RAID driver which was doing the Wrong Thing. You'll need to know exactly what chipset your motherboard has; under XP you can find this in Device Manager under "System devices" (my laptop says Intel 82801BAM/82815), but they probably hid it somewhere else in Vista.

I'd love to know what the underlying bug was here; it seems crazy that one particular multimedia codec can cause a read pattern that makes a RAID driver fall over, or that a RAID driver has so much state space that it can't be thoroughly tested, and such bugs found, before release.

Peter

Nah, it's in the same place. Getting to Device Manager is easier though: bring up the start menu and type "device manager" (sans quotes, obviously) into the box at the bottom. Device Manager will appear at the top of the list; click on it.

Apparently my laptop's got a "Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family". Most of the other devices are "Intel(R) ICH8...".

Quicktime/iTunes has really weird issues with Vista. I couldn't play any QT videos reliably until I turned off Readyboost. Its a known issue apparently and Apple/Microsoft haven't done anything to fix it yet.

I really don't like Quicktime on Windows. Next worst would be Realplayer...

I'm really puzzled about how Quicktime could expose a RAID driver bug as well. Those are two things that should be far removed from ever caring about each other in a system. Same for readyboost. How is that causing problems for Quicktime? Do the Win32 APIs really allow a user level program to go that deep and cause damage?

It is a shame that when apps leave their native platform, they degrade so much. Quicktime for Windows has never been great, while the flipside was also true. Windows Media Player for the Mac was painfully our of it's native environment, and was generally not updated often. Microsoft finally killed it off in favor of pointing people to a 3rd party component that adds their proprietary media formats into the Quicktime layer of the system. Now if Apple would do the same, and just code their stuff to work as a Windows codec, things would be simpler.

My completely unsubstantiated sheer guess is that Quicktime is mucking about at a low level to implement some underhanded shenanigans. In other words, one way to cause this sort of train-wreck would be attempting to write some kind of magic cookie (maybe to document the presence or absence of Quicktime Pro) to some "unused" area of the first hard drive, invisible to the filesystem, and doing so in such a low-level way (BIOS calls?) that it escapes the notice of the RAID drivers, which then come along and see unmirrored data and panic.

I'll confess that I once worked on a product which did something similar -- although this was for Acorn RiscOS, where both the available filesystems and available hardware were much more limited, so it stood a much smaller chance of unexpectedly breaking something. We soon abandoned any idea we had of doing the same thing in the Windows version.

Peter

I thought that type of low level access wasn't allowed under NT based systems unless you have a kernel level driver installed to allow such access. Every low level mucking SAN product I worked with on Windows had to do this, and the code in that area had to be bullet proof to avoid blue screens.

As for Quicktime Pro licensing, it's just stored in one of the settings files it creates. I used to just back that file up and dump it back when I installed a new machine, instead of having to key in the code.