New 3850 Installed; Sound no longer works

I installed a 3850, new PSU, and ram for my brother inlaw. Well as far as the gfx are concerned, the card is a total Knock-Out. Awesome bang for the buck there. However, when trying to install the drivers for the card, the cd was blank. Evidently many other buyers have had this problem as well. I went to ati's site and downloaded the 7.12 catalyst drivers (just the driver itself) and after doing so, the sound ceased working on his PC after the reboot. He has onboard sound and it's an HDMI device, whatever that is. The device manager says it is still working properly however no sound is being played. I uninstalled, rebooted, and reinstalled the audio drivers, but this did not work either.

This is also a common problem for some folks with the 3850 and 3870. Other users are saying the video card drivers are trumping the sound drivers and taking the sound drivers place. I can't figure out how to fix this

Is HDMI the video card? If so, that's definitely what is trying to happen as that is the device that shows up in the sound menu. No other device is viewable, just the HDMI.

I don't know if we installed an adapter on the back of it like that. We put the VGA adapter in the spot that black one is in, however.

Details would be good, as I am sure I tried this already.

Also, as a side note, this PC is 32bit Vista.

ewww vista.
I'll have to try, I'll dual boot vista business.

regeist554 may be correct.

Most excellent! One of my biggest peeves w/ Vista is the way the rearranged all the settings - Classic view, I love you.

I'm just thinking it has the wrong default playback device. Swapping it over to onboard or disabling the HDMI part of the device should fix the problem. Even if you do get a new card, you will still have to make sure it is the default playback / recording device as opposed to the HDMI.

Hopefully this clears things up a bit, if not, don't fear to come back and ask more questions.

If he has a soundcard, not onboard, you can simply power down the PC, remove the soundcard, reboot. Then once in the desktop go ahead and power down again, re-install the soundcard and boot her up. This should make windows recognize the card again and may give you the option of making it primary all in one shot.

If not then go back through the control panel steps posters above listed and see if your soundcard shows up now.

If you do have onboard sound, hmm well unsure off top of my head, maybe reinstall drivers for sound that came with the board might work?

The same thing happened with my friend when he installed his 3850.
All he had to do was set the audio device in the control panel as some here have already mentioned. As rgeist554 said, the card was trying to act as the sound device.

Double check your BIOS settings, it may have bumped the intergrated audio into a disabled mode if it was on auto-detect.

This happened to someone else in the forum, and they had to go back into the bios to move it back to onboard audio.

several things you can do. Edit: my fix is for XP, but maybe something similar exists in Vista.

1. go to "device manager", expand "sound, video and game controllers", select "ATI function Driver for high definition audio -ati aa01", select "disable". Don't select "delete". If you do, it will just try to reinstall it on next start up. Make sure you select "disable".

2. uninstall the ATI high def audio software thru "add remove programs".

3. uninstall all the ATI 385 drivers. Reinstall the drivers, but select custom install. Then install all the ATI software except the High Def software. Edit: This should work for vista.

When i installed the latest catylist drivers i did the last one. They all have worked for me in the past.

Did that. Did not work.

thnxyou so much for your kindness my friend of posting your problem and solutions..i really appreciate it and i have just downloaded the driver on the site that ws given and i hope it will work..again thank you

Start
>Control Panel
>>Sounds, Speech and Audio Devices (Category View)
>>>Sounds and Audio Devices
>>>>Audio

The drop down box should display which ever you want the sound on, Default is ATi, I put mine back onto on board.

I had these exact problems and all that was needed was to select CMEDIA as the output device. The Bios settings should be returned to their default values in case integrated sound was turned off.