no sound on new mobo (ac97)

[jimbob]

ok, I just replaced my neighbors motherboard because it died. He had a gigabyte 7zx-1, we replaced it with a matsonic 8127c. Both boards have the ac97 sound-chip. When we installed the new board, the sound doesn't work. I can't get the volume-control to show up in the system tray, and the audio properties in the control panel show no playback device. I've loaded all the drivers I can find for ac97, removed everything from safe-mode device manager, nothing is working. I put in another hd with a fresh install of me and it is working fine...is there any way to make this work without formatting his drive & reinstalling windows (he has windows me).

Thanks for any help

 

[Guest]

Since it appears to be working with a fresh installation of ME on a different drive then it is not the BIOS. I would recommend re-installing WinME on the troubled drive without a format. It is possible to install a version of windows overtop of an existing version as a repair option. I had to do this with a somewhat similar problem. When running the installation from the CD (that is using the bootable floppy disk)it will ask you if you want to install overtop of the existing version. You want to do this with one BIG condition -- make sure that you backup the existing system files in case something goes wrong. This condition has both saved and burnt my @$$ many times. Personally I would not deal with onboard sound due to it's obvious imperfections. I usually disable it in the BIOS and install a better sound card. I wish you luck in your adventure.

Have fun.

Tahoma

 

[girish]

did you try ALL the AC97 drivers?
check the manual what codec it has, there are al least 4 codecs available, and on some crapware, there are even different codecs on boards of the same model!

try this: delete all the audio related files from c:\windows\inf\other - those seem to conflict with newer ones and not letting windows identify the right driver.
now try each driver, there might be 2~3 of them supplied on the motherboard CD.
install the WDM driver if its available, else get the appropriate driver for the OS.
if it doesnt work, remove it, delete its inf files from windows\inf\other directory and reboot the machine. this time install the next driver.

if it still doest take it, a fresh instal might help.
following comands almost always work:
<b>
e:\win98\format c:/s/q
e:\win98\setup /is</b>
where e: is assumeed to be your CD-ROM drive.

and be sure to backup your data on the c drive before formatting it!

girish

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