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QuickTime fun

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Here's something I discovered this morning when working with a relative's machine.

If your machine likes displaying the error message "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive X:" (maybe with the title qttask) whenever you log in or you start Quick Time, here's one possible reason.

In QuickTime, you can save certain movies you have been played previously as favourites. The application also automatically saves a list of the latest files you've viewed. These lists are stored in a file called QuickTimeFavorites.qtr, and contains full path to the movie files. It seems like QuickTime for some reason tries to open each the movie files whenever you start the application - maybe to see if they still exist. If this list contains a file that's on a removable drive (e.g. a CD) or on a device that doesn't exist any more (maybe you repartitioned), the error message above pops up.

To work around this, you can make sure that the device can be read by QuickTime - e.g. always keep a CD, any CD, in the drive.

Or, to fix this problem, you can delete the file QuickTimeFavorites.qtr in your "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\QuickTime" directory and restart QuickTime. Note that this will make you lose your list of favorite and recently viewed movies. But at least the application will work again.

 This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2005
    Not that I have this problem, but I have a question; is this a plain-text file that can be edited?
    If so, you could remove the offending entry without losing all your favorites.

    Just a thought.
  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2005
    Unfortunately, it's a binary file. QuickTime itself has an editor for the favourites and you can clear the recent files list within the app. But that's tricky to do if the app won't start... I didn't try, but maybe you can hex edit the file and change references to e.g. the CD ROM drive to C: if you really want to keep your list of favourites.