Sound device has been "disappeared"

kissekatt

Distinguished
Mar 4, 2006
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18,510
Specs:
Motherboard: Biostar NF4 4X-A7
Soundcard: Integrated, Realtek ALC655 (AC'97)

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Ram: 1024 MB DDR PC3200
HD: Maxtor 200 GB S-ATA 7200rpm/8mb
Graphics card: Geforce 6600GT 128 MB,
OS: WinXP, some flashy corporate edition (can find out full name if necessary)

Store-built, bought new, shipped by mail, OS installed by me. Had it for about a month, no problems until now.


I was running the computer as usually, when I tried starting up a game (which has worked fine in the past) and then suddenly noticed that there wasn't any sound. Usually, this is due to the speakers in my monitor, but my usual tricks to solve it didn't work. I checked the volume controls just to see that I hadn't accidentally muted it or something, but when I opened it it "looked funny", having only 3 different sliders to adjust and none of them being them master volume. Since this was going nowhere, I restarted the computer. Once it had rebooted, I tried running Winamp to check that the speakers were back online, when I got this error message:

No sound devices found. Please buy a soundcard first (or install proper drivers if you think that you have one). More info can be found at [website]

Error code: 2
Windows error message:
"A device ID has been used that is out of range for your system"


When I had tried running Winamp prior to the reboot, it had just mutedly played the music, ie the visualisers went up and down but there was no sound. I checked the Sounds and Audio Devices tab of the Control Panel, and sure enough it says "No Audio Device". I tried restarting the computer again, but the fault remained.

Since then I have tried "Add hardware" and "Scan for hardware changes" both in and out of safe mode, reinstalling the drivers from the CD that came with the computer, downloaded and installed the (sound) chipset drivers from Biostars website, tried to "add hardware" again, and over the course of things I've restarted the computer several times, but so far nothing seems to have worked. In case it is important, I do not recall if I had played sounds or not earlier during the session, ie I don't know if this problem was something that appeared prior to/during start-up or during normal computer use.

Any help is appreciated, although bear in mind that I'm not too familiar with the insides of a computer, as opposed to using a computer and navigating the OS, nor the special jargon that goes with it (eg I have no idea how "flashing" is done or what it does), so try to keep it simple in those regards.

The problem sounds similar to the problem in this thread by Fallschirmjager, but since I'm not certain I decided to start a new thread and that's probably the customary way anyhow.