So Saturday morning I was sipping my coffee and browsing the web and reading
an article titled “It’s Official: Apple is the New Microsoft” here
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136949-c,companynews/article.html and
pondering the way DRM has been used to lock us all into Steve Jobs’ world.
By late Saturday evening and into early Sunday morning I was cursing the
nefarious ways of both Apple and Microsoft and wondering just how anyone
outside of the developer community deals with the nonsense that both of
these companies have foisted on us.
It was Saturday afternoon when I needed to insert and look at the contents
of a DVD (a regular old data DVD from MSDN) that I noticed that my trusty
office workstation no longer had a functional DVD device. Instead it had
nothing at all where its DVD drive letter ought to have been. On reflection
my DVD drive had been busted since approximately July 27, which by no
coincidence was the day I upgraded to Itunes version 7.x. The fact that I
would ignore a vanished DVD device for over a month indicates just how much
these devices are going the way of the floppy drive.
Being somewhat savvy in matters related to devices attached to computers, I
brought up Device Mangler in order to determine what exactly the system
thought was the problem. Device Mangler indeed had a yellow banged CD icon.
At this point of course, serviceability of the Windows platform immediately
fails the WWYMD test. (What Would Your Mother Do.) Your Mother would not
know to open up Device Mangler, your mother would have no clue why her
system no longer had a CD or DVD drive. Your mother would be shit out of
luck and most likely would be on the phone to you, or the other Designated
Geek in her life.
But I digress. Mangler told me that some service was disabled. Mangler would
not tell me what service was disabled. Mangler, because I have some limited
savvy in the area, also showed me that there was a driver stack for my DVD
device and that it had both upper and lower filter drivers that were
unsigned and that I thought were rather suspicious. Up above the standard
cdrom class driver was some abomination named GEARAspiWDM.sys from an outfit
named Gear and down below the standard cdrom class driver was another
abomination named pxhelp20.sys from our old friends, Sonic Solutions.
Google. I’m sure google is getting around to being just as wantonly bad as
every other huge corporation on the planet, but for the moment I have a long
term relationship with google and I will not hear about it. Google is my
friend. Google quickly informed me that Itunes ate my DVD. Appallingly,
google also showed me that quite a few other people running releases of
Windows both 32bit and 64bit and XP and Vista were having their DVD drives
consumed by some release or other of Itunes roughly 7.x by name. Apple
support was publicly blithely unaware that Itunes along with whatever DRM
crap they are doing with Gear’s driver and Sonic Solution’s driver wrapping
the standard cdrom class driver was the cause of major malfunctions around
the planet. Does Apple not bother testing their products? Do they freaking
care that Itunes eats your DVD drive?
Meanwhile back to Windows. I could of course uninstall Itunes but it seems I
have all this DRM music that is just bitrot unless I have Itunes on my
system. (See “It’s Official: Apple is the New Microsoft”.) So I figured that
perhaps Apple might have corrected their unconfessed blunder and updated
Itunes to some newer release. That naturally fixed nothing but consumed the
usual update and reboot cycle and of course quicktime changed all my media
settings for me. So back to Windows. I browsed through the event log looking
for this mysterious service that was claimed by device mangler to be
disabled, thus preventing me from having my DVD. No luck, why would anything
of actual interest be in the system event log? Who would look there for an
event on a system that was the cause of a problem?
By now I had wasted several hours, but am also obsessed with getting my dvd
back so I will not be detered. Off to setupapi.log. Setupapi.log tells me
that (after numerous experiments and reboots and then getting a usb dvd
drive out so I can just unplug it to get a re-install) that none of my (now
2) dvd drives will work because “a service is disabled”. What service? No
clue. Crank up setupapi.log to Maxim Verbosity and lo and behold it now
informs me that the problem is that “a service is disabled”. What service?
No clue.
Of course what setupapi.log actually notes is:
“#I163 Device not started: Device has problem: 0x20:
CM_PROB_DISABLED_SERVICE”.
Did it occur to anyone over at Microsoft that WHICH service was disabled (if
indeed that were the actual cause of the problem) might be of interest to
someone USING the system and TRYING to repair the problem?
It was nearing midnight but I refused to give up. So I rebooted for it seems
like the 100th time and set my workstation to debug mode and attempted to
run windbg in live kernel debugging mode. Oddly, this hangs my system
shortly after I login. My system, while it takes approximately FOREVER to
actually get finished starting all the crap it starts, is pretty stable and
now all of a sudden it is reliably hanging every time I boot it.
As I can’t get to live kd, due to a mysterious new malfunction in my system,
I decided to use windbg from one of my test systems to see what was going
on. I reboot (110th reboot in this series) and quickly recall something I
remember reading about: if you have windows media player installed it has a
hissy fit if there is a kernel debugger attached, in fact it has that hissy
fit if the system is booted in debug mode at all. DRM again of course.
Itunes has eaten my DVD drive to make sure I can’t burn the media content I
paid Apple for anyway they don’t think is appropriate and Windows won’t let
me debug my system because I might learn something about their DRM crap that
might allow me to use the media content I bought from their content servers
in some manner they don’t like.
The DRM madness on Windows is their WMPNetworkSvc and friends, all
associated with Windows Media Player. With the system booted with the kernel
debugger enabled, it plows you into three or four breakpoints to inform you
that it is likely calling the DRM police right now to have you arrested for
reverse engineering their damn DRM so they can lock you into their content
just like Steve Jobs did with Itunes. Oh and Windows Media Player is putting
stuff in my error log:
“A new media server was not initialized because WMCreateDeviceRegistration()
encountered error ‘0xc00d2751’. The Windows Media DRM components on your
computer might be corrupted. Verify that protected files play correctly in
Windows Media Player, and then restart the WMPNetworkSvc service.”
What would your mother do with that message?
I uninstalled Itunes. I manually removed the upper and lower filter drivers
as the uninstall of Itunes left all of their DVD eating crap right where it
was. My DVD drive is back. My media content is a pile of bitrot. As far as I
can tell from my good friend Google, neither Apple nor Microsoft nor Gear
nor Sonic Solutions is owning up to the Itunes mess.
What would your mother do in this situation? How are normal people dealing
with this crap? Had I charged my going rate for the work I did to repair my
system I could have replaced it with a brand new and fully equipped
workstation.
What does it matter what we driver developers do to improve the quality of
our software when it is put to such awful idiotic use, use that craps out
systems irrespective of the code quality of kernel mode drivers, and when
the platform itself provides no useful information to help your mother
figure out that Itunes ate her DVD?
p.s. I could have used system restore to undo the Itunes 7.x upgrade damage,
system restore is a pretty neat feature. However I upgraded to the 7.x
Itunes disaster back in late July and this is now September and system
restore is not particularly selective so that was not really a good option.
=====================
Mark Roddy DDK MVP
Windows Vista/W2K3/XP Consulting
Broken Driver Code? Call us.
Hollis Technology Solutions 603-321-1032 www.hollistech.com