Windows 7, iTunes and GEARAspiWDM.sys. No black turtlenecks for me.

By James at March 23, 2009 16:24
Filed Under: Technology in General, Beta Software

So after my adventures yesterday with Win7 Beta 1 and no web access, I thought things were all cleared up. Tonight I realized my DVD Drive wasn’t being recognized. Going into Device Manager I saw that Windows had disabled the Drive because the driver being used was unsigned. Digging a bit deeper I find that one of the drivers being used is GEARAspiWDM.sys. This is a pretty common driver for DVD/CD RW drives, so I was intrigued why that was the issue.

Googling for GEARAspiWDM.sys I found the following article on ZDNet by Ed Bott, “An inside look at Apple's sneaky iTunes 8 upgrade”. The article talks about how Apple sneaks in a bunch of crap during their iTunes and QuickTime upgrades and doesn’t indicate what is being installed. I followed the articles suggestions about trying to roll back to a previous version, but, of course, there isn’t one on my system.

A quick trip to www.gearsoftware.com, Support, Drivers and I download Driver_Installer_x86_x64.exe Version 4.008.5, Date Feb 4, 2009. Running the installer is a snap, and I have my DVD Drive back.

Thanks Ed! Thanks Gear Software! Screw you Apple.

Namaste,

James

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About the author

James James is a three time and current Microsoft MVP in Client App Development, a past Director on the INETA North America Board, a husband and dad, and has been developing software since the early days of Laser Discs and HyperCard stacks. As the Founder and President of the Inland Empire .NET User's Group, he has fondly watched it grow from a twice-a-month, early Saturday morning group of five in 2003, to a robust and rambunctious gathering of all types and sizes of .NET developers.

James loves to dig deep into the latest cutting edge technologies - sometimes with spectacular disasters - and spread the word about the latest and greatest bits, getting people excited about developing web sites and applications on the .NET platform, and using the best tools for the job. He tries to blog as often as he can, but usually gets distracted by EF, LINQ, MVC, ASP, SQL, XML, and most other types of acronyms. To keep calm James plays a mean Djembe and tries to practice his violin. You can follow him on twitter at @latringo.

And as usual, the comments, suggestions, writings and rants are my own, and really shouldn't reflect the opinions of my employer. That is, unless it really does.

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