Nvidia updates SATA driver fixing Quicktime issue

Quicktime SATAUp to only a few days ago, the combination of a NVIDIA chipset, SATA hard drive, Apple Quicktime Player and Windows Vista resulted in intolerable Quicktime videos playback from disk. Clearly something was wrong in one or the other, but neither company was going to accept the responsibility. After both NVIDIA and Apple had played their “not our fault” card for four painful months, finally NVIDIA has come out on top with new SATA drivers that appears to fix the issue for myself and other users too.

A few weeks ago I documented the horrible playback performance for Quicktime videos on Windows Vista with my NVIDIA/SATA system configuration. Not only did I have a hard time discovering the cause of the issue, there was also no apparent remedy. In each respective knowledge base, both companies stare at each other hoping the other could do something about. After several Quicktime updates later, clearly nothing was happening on Apple’s side.

NVIDIA SATA driver update

NVIDIAOut of the blue on the August 1, NVIDIA released a driver update for its SATA controller through Windows Update. It is however a recommended update so you’ll have to enforce it manually. It updates the SATA driver to version 5.10.2600.995 (v9.95) dating 2/07/2007. This driver supercedes NVIDIA’s own SATA driver available on the website of v9.92 at the time of writing. After a flawless install and reboot, it clearly fixed the issue for me and at least two others readers on this blog.

In the end, all it takes is a fix. Even now we still don’t know who’s fault it actually was, but from the perspective of a user we don’t really care either. The software business is not shy of workarounds, for example it’s even officially documented to write HTML hacks around stupid Internet Explorer 6 bugs. Arguably at the four month mark both companies deserve to be slapped, but NVIDIA has fixed the problem and that’s all that matters.

Update: NVIDIA PR has kindly commented on the issue. “The SATA issue was a known bug and fixed in our drivers. The Apple iTunes and Vista issue was not related to us.” Sounds like there’s another iTunes issue besides Quicktime, bummer.

Update 2: For those of you who can’t acquire the driver through Windows Update, a downloadable file is provided on the NVIDIA forums. Update 3: Or thanks to Rafael, from Windows Update directly itself.

36 insightful thoughts

  1. Just a quick note – you might want to spell out the date; i.e. “2nd August 2007” instead of 2/07/07. People in the USA might get confused ๐Ÿ™‚

  2. Lets hope these new SATA drivers are stable, the last round of nVidia SATA drivers bugchecked my machine nightly at 2am.

    Good catch, Long!

  3. Michael Griffiths Umm August is the 8th month in the year hee… hee… by the way I’m one of those “People in the USA” and i did not “get confused” ya that bug never effected me… I NEVER Use QUICK TIME!(on my new comp)

  4. O by the way Long meant july 7, 2007 Michael Griffiths your the one confusing ME! or wait is it sarcasm! aaa Run!

  5. You’ve found Quicktime movies on the web? What, are you browsing pepsi.com on archive.org or something? Who on earth uses or cares about Quicktime? Who on earth would pay for fullscreen?

  6. @Brian:
    I’ve found that even the Vista Codec Pack plugins for Quicktime seem to have issues as well, so it’s not just the Quicktime player Apple makes.

  7. QuickTime is industry standard for capturing, editing and whole postproduction workflow of video… QT is great, it’s just the player that sucks.

  8. @That One Guy

    That’s normal, SATA is meant to be hotpluggable.

    @Long Zheng

    For some reason the driver does not show up on Windows Update for me (on my old nforce4 AMD/socket 939 board). I DO suffer from the described problem though (just like everybody I know that uses Vista and SATA on any nforce board). I assume nvidia only released those drivers for some of their chipsets but not for all that are affected. The new drivers SHOULD work fine on just about all nforce chipsets (the SATA-drivers almost always do) so is there a way you could make it available for the rest of us that were clearly forgotten?

  9. @Long Zheng & Rafael

    Thank you both very much. This driver fixes the issue, no idea why Windowsupdate doesn’t offer it for my system.

  10. I just purchased a HP Pavilion Slimline that is having problem playing QuickTime content. NVIDIA SATA driver is 5.10.2600.968 from 3/19/2007 (in this date format). The driver above in the screen shot says 2/07/2007 (February 7th) but has .995 as the last 3 numbers of the version. Nothing is coming up for me in Windows Update or Update Driver links. Is this new driver from February or July?

  11. New driver is not showing up in Windows Update for my new HP. How do I install them manually if I download from the MS site above? I tried putting the files in the hp/DRIVERS/NVIDIA_SERIAL_ATA folder, but old version number still showed up in Device Manager.

  12. LIARS!!! It’s not only NVIDIA issue. I have different SATA (on Toshiba M400) with same problem. QuickTime just BSODs Vista.

    MS already has unpublished hotfix KB932094 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932094/en-us). So real problem lays in Vista itself, but not in some particular hardware manufacturer’s drivers. MS updates “Partition Manager” in that hotfix. I’ve installed it and now QT runs without any problems.

  13. Windows Update didn’t show anything ๐Ÿ™ …
    So, I went to Nvidia site and downloaded the v9.92 of the drivers and after upgrading, I still got the same problem…
    Is there any link to the Vista32 drivers for v9.95?
    Damn, this sucks! ๐Ÿ™

  14. Hello Mr. Zheng (or is it Mr. Long?)I was reading your article: Nvidia updates SATA driver fixing Quicktime issue due in part because I have the same issue. I was wondering if you had that Nvidia driver that fixes that issue somewhere. The reason why is I couldn’t find the driver at Windows Update and the “drivers” that were posted on your webpage didn’t resolve my issue nor did they even change the version number on the SATA driver’s properties window. I currently have Nvidia SATA driver version 5.10.2600.992

  15. Anyone using Silm Server and an nForce based mobo? I’m getting crazy RAID failure messages with this new driver. Can’t recall whether the earlier driver caused ’em too.

  16. thanks a lot for the tip

    I have a A8N-E [Nforce4] mobo and after the install of nforce_winvista32_15.01_international, I downloaded Vista Nforce4 SATA RAID drivers for Vista 9.95 x86 …
    then I’got a error message trying to install so …
    I manualy copied idecoi.dll and nvstor32.sys to their respective places, rebooted, and now Quicktime and .MOV files play perfectly, even 1080p content.

    ๐Ÿ˜‰

  17. While installing Vista, I have used Nvidia driver thru Floppy drive. and after installation in device manager disk is shown as SATA.

    But After Windows Update it again change to SCSI Drive.

    Is there any problem for using Vista by setting?

    I try to Update the device using WinVista [new driver from nVidia] but i got error the current drivers is latest one.

    also my PC hangs sometimes after installing some problem and all. is this related to above driver problem?

    please reply

    Thanks

  18. Getting Nvidia Critical RAID Access Errors on SATA #,#?
    Having studdering problems in Vista with QuickTime?
    Is your Nvidia RAID Array getting corrupted in Vista?
    Do you have in Intel ICH9R and have these problems, too?
    Already upgraded your Vista Nvidia RAID Drivers to 5.10.2600.995 (v9.95) as suggested in other forums, to no avail?

    Here is your solution: IGNORE THE STUPID MICROSOFT DESCRIPTION, THIS HOTFIX WILL RESOLVE ALL OF THE ABOVE PROBLEMS!!!

    Vista Article ID:
    932094

    Microsoft URL:
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932094/en-us

    Hotfix Filename:
    Windows6.0-KB932094-x86.msu

    I’m telling you, this resolved everything, for me and all my friends. Everything else we read in forums about breaking your array, or reinstalling, or newer drivers, or patching BIOS, or whatever… was all a waste of time. This was the real solution. Good luck.

  19. Just wanted to post for those of you who couldn’t install the driver through many reasons.

    – Download the the drivers
    – Open and extract out nvstor32.sys
    – Download the latest nForce drivers from nVidia
    – Open the nForce installer with WinRar or alternative
    – Extract all the contents
    – Browse to IDE\WinVista\sata_ide
    – Replace the .995 nvstor32.sys, previously extracted, with the IDE\WinVista\sata_ide one
    – Go onto device manager
    – Any instances of “NVIDIA nForce4 Serial ATA Controller” right click and select “Update Driver Software”
    – “Browse my computer for driver software”
    – “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer”
    – “Have Disk” option
    – Browse to where you extracted IDE\WinVista\sata and select nvstor32
    – Ignore the rubbish about unsigned crap
    – Restart and you will have .995 working

    It wouldn’t work for me but following these steps I managed to force Vista into making it work. Quicktime and iTunes work fine now.

  20. Hi,

    I was getting the same random
    “Nvidia Critical RAID Access Errors on SATA #,#?”
    forcing me to rebuild my array whilst

    a) playing mp4 files with quicktime
    b) importing mp4 files greater than 50mb in Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 ( I believe it used quicktime under the covers)

    Hitachi diagnostics said everything checked out okay. Tried everything in this thread and the one that sorted the problem was pointers to the Vista KB932094 hotfix. (Thanks to Solutionman and BlackTiger)

    My setup is
    Asus Crosshair AM2/ Nvidia nForce 590 / Vista x64
    Hope this saves you some head scratching.

  21. I’m using the nForce780i and running Vista Ultimate x64 with SP1 installed.
    I am receiving the message : “Nvidia Critical RAID Access Errors on SATA #,#”

    1. Checked my cables.. connected correctly.
    2. Upgraded my Nvidia nForce Raid/SATA Driver to latest version, 5.10.2600.0998
    3. Attempted to install Vista KB932094 hotfix, but it says the hotfix does not apply to my system.
    (Maybe already included in sp1?)

    I am still receiving the error and I don’t know what else to check.

  22. Yeah, that hotfix is included in SP1 (I checked the listing of hotfixes in it). Bummer that it’s still broken for you. ๐Ÿ™

  23. I can’t get windows update to find this hotfix. This one is an important one to me, because I’ve successfully installed it on another computer and it fixed all my problems (my computer didn’t just have trouble playing quicktime, it froze my computer, and iTunes didn’t play correctly). Now, Maybe I’m being a bit dense, but I can’t figure out how to install the updates that this article provided links to. I tried to follow Liam Smith’s directions, but I couldn’t make sense of it. So, since they’re available, once I’ve downloaded the update, how does it install?? I appreciate any help

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