Lost sound on XP reinstall 2

[bilojax]

I had to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch, and somehow I lost all audio except system sounds (like beep from errors). It appears that I do not have drivers installed for whatever sound cards / audio devices I have, because under Contol Panel, Sounds and Audio Devices, it says "no audio device".

The computer in question is a cheap refurb, and the only disk that came with it was a Windows XP disk - there is no disk of drivers.

 

[goombawaho]

Use this page to understand how to get the PCI VEN information for the unknown device in device manager and then post it here or do a search for that string.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-find-unknown-device-drivers-by-their-vendor-device-id/

It should help you locate a suitable driver.


Or you could tell us what motherboard you have (brand and model) by cracking open the case.

 

[rclarke250]

Or you could go to

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/pc-wizard.html

and download and run the free pc wizard and it will tell you more than you need to know about your whole computer without having to search the vendor ids. You can find out who made the system board, model, and go to there website and find the drivers made to run on the board, failing that it will give you the chip id and you can go to their website and download the general drivers that may not have all of the fancy stuff sometimes included by the computer maker.

 

[bilojax]

Thanks for the help. Using those resources, I find that I have a hardware item called “multimedia audio controller” listed which does not have a driver. The device id is “PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_266E&SUBSYS_01791028&REV_03\3&172E68DD&0&F2” which, using the resources suggeted, I have translated to “Intel Corporation - codec incorporated into VT82C686A/B, VT8231, VT8233/A/C, VT8235, VT8237/R, VT8251 Southbrid”.

I’m guessing all that just means that this is the audio controller built into the intel chip in my machine. Is that right, or is it a physically-separate card?

As far as installing the driver, I went to the intel driver download site and didn’t have any luck using the above full description. However, when I searched for just “multimedia audio controller” I found a driver for “Audio: Intel® HD Audio Controller – Realtek”. Is that the one I want? (I started to install it using the advanced options but was scared off by a warning that it could not confirm that was the right driver and installing the wrong driver could make my system inoperable.)

 

[bilojax]

Re: rclarke250 post. I came across several sites that offered to scan my computer to look for (and fix automatically, some of them) missing drivers, etc. Aren’t these potential security threats? I notice that some of them advertise promises of “no adware, no malware, no viruses”, so presuably there have been some problems in the past. Are there any sites of sufficient reputation to trust them? How about the cpuid.com site rclarke has linked, can anybody else vouch for its trustworthyness? (no offense meant to you, rclarke, just trying to be careful here).

 

[linney]

Do you have a driver CD that came with the machine, if you do it will have most of the drivers that you require although they may be out of date and require updating.

Speaking of Updates are there any offerings from Windows Update. You might have to go to the Windows Update site and choose the Custom option when offered.

Do you mean "Southbridge" rather than Southbird, if so that would be referring to the CPU Processor or Motherboard, I think.

Search for 0x266E on these two pages.

http://www.pcidatabase.com/vendor_details.php?id=1302

http://www.pcidatabase.com/search.php?device_search_str=266E&device_search=Search

and you should see this -

0x266E Chip Number: VIA Technologies Vinyl AC'97 Codec Combo Driver (W

Chip Description: VIA AC97 codec incorporated into VT82C686A/B, VT8231, VT8233/A/C, VT8235, VT8237/R, VT8251 Southbrid

Notes:

http://www.softwarepatch.com/utilities/viaac97-security-dl.html

The link after "Notes" leads to this download "vinyl_v700b.zip" which with any luck might be what you are after?

 

[bilojax]

Yep, linney, that vinyl zip file had the drivers I needed. I've got sound again! Thanks everybody for the help.

 

[rclarke250]

It doesn't scan for needed drivers and offer to download them, it scans your system for the vendor ids and tells you what they are, it also just gets information from windows, that may not easily be found. They are just informational tools. Do a search, you will find many reputable sites that verify their usage. Here's the review from cnet.

http://download.cnet.com/PC-Wizard-2010/3000-2094_4-10793737.html

 

[goombawaho]

My thought on that software is: why bother?? You can get the identification string and figure out what the hardware is and find a driver for it without having to install any "foreign" software on your machine.

It keeps the machine clean by not installing anything not needed.