no sound with onboard realtek ac'97

[vgion]

Hello.
I recently upgraded my PC with a gigabyte GA-7VA-C
motherboard and an AMD Athlon XP 2200. The motherboard has
an on board sound card (Avance AC'97 from Realtek-ALC650).
Everything seems to run well apart from the sound (no
sound). In device manager there was a black exclamation
mark (in a yellow circle) at the sound device. The message
I receive when I click properties is a Code 10: This
device is either not present, not working properly or
does not have all the drivers installed. I tried
almost everything. Remove the device, unistall the
drivers, re-install them (either by using the CD that came
with the motherboard or by leting windows find the
appropriate drivers or by downloading drivers from the
net) but nothing seems to work. The device does not appear
to have any conflicts but I also tried to change the slot
of another device that was using the same IRQ. However,
windows assigned again the same IRQ so nothing changed.
I have also tried to remove some devices and although the IRQ assigned to the sound card changed, there was still no sound.
I finally downloaded the updated drivers from realtek's site. After I install them and reboot, the computer freezes. When I press ctrl-alt-del I can see that the program that is running is cmdninst.exe. Apparently there is something wrong there and windows cannot process this operation. I need also to mention that I disabled from BIOS, the games port because if this is enabled the computer will again freeze exactly in the same way I mentioned before.

After rebooting and starting in safe mode and removing all the devices, the games port was finally installed BUT the problem with the sound remains exactly as before.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
(OS Windows Me 4.90.3000)

[NooNoo]

I would shut the machine down, restart, go into bios and turn off the onboard sound and related items (midi, gameport, etc), then boot to SAFE mode, remove any and all sound related drivers (including the gameport) and then shut down and restart to normal mode.

Confirm in control panel multimedia there are not sound devices, confirm in device manager there are no sound devices and shut down again.

Go back into bios, enable your sound devices and reinstall from the drivers from the CD.

If you end up with the same problem, you need to free up some resources - for instance disabling one of the serial (com) ports in bios and/or device manager and then repeat the removal of sound and reinstallation again.

[Orangeman]

I know this sounds elementary but I would make sure your jumper settings are correct. Also, I would uninstall the drivers with either the uninstall utility, or with another uninstal utility.

Good Luck,
Orangeman

[3D Prophet III]

Originally posted by vgion
Hello.
I recently upgraded my PC with a gigabyte GA-7VA-C
motherboard and an AMD Athlon XP 2200.

(OS Windows Me 4.90.3000)

When you did this upgrade, did you reprogram your system or did you just replace the motherboard and processor and kept everything the same on the HDD? I've experienced a lot of problems using a programmed HDD from one motherboard/chipset setup to another system with a different chipset & processor.

If you're using a HDD that came from a different system board I'd reprogram. :drink:

[NooNoo]

ProphetIII, I think you mean reload the drivers/os, re-programming means to literally rewrite the program's code. It is not my intention to embarrass you, simply to make sure that people do not get confused with terminology.

[3D Prophet III]

No offence taken NooNoo. I did mean re-installation of Windows. Just use to many years of customers asking if their computers were going to need to be re-programmed after replacing a failed HDD. I guess I've been programmed with that sort of response. :D

[Rifleman @ Layman's PC]

2 things, if you haven't installed the chipset driver, do so before installing the audio.
if you already installed the chipset drivers, then try installing the (I know it sounds crazy) Windows 95 drivers

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by Rifleman @ Layman's PC
2 things, if you haven't installed the chipset driver, do so before installing the audio.
if you already installed the chipset drivers, then try installing the (I know it sounds crazy) Windows 95 drivers

Nope that's not crazy that's good advice ;)

There's three varieties of the 'infamous' AC97 chip :rolleyes: , the two channel, pretend 4 channel (two channels but seperate right & left connectors) and the 6 channel version, but there's only two actual chips the 'normal' and 'advanced', however, there's four lots of drivers - two VXD (virtual extended device) based 9x type drivers for both 'normal/advanced' and two WDM (windows driver model) based drivers for xp/w2k (though ME and 98SE can use either) again for normal/advanced.... but there's hundreds and hundred's of OEM implementations of the

All four drivers work with either chip to some greater or lesser extent depending on whatever else is onboard that particular system. What makes a muck of things is how ACPI chooses to allocate resources to it. If ACPI is on only a determined 'tinkerer' can get it to work with the WDM based driver.....

But thankfully the VXD driver works whether ACPI is on or off as it handles the device assignments directly and doesn't depend on the rather spurious code for the WDM model which seems to work with nothing in 9x, but that's another story.....

So after all that long winded prattle follow Noo's advice for comletely removing all driver traces in safe mode except the bit about using the drivers from the CD - get the 95 driver (that's a VXD type one for sure !) from here - on realteks site (http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?software=True&compamodel=ALC650) .....

& like Rifleman says make sure you have the VIA 4-in-1 (that should be hyperion !) chipset patch installed first.....

If you want the drivers on the CD to work you'll either need to fathom how to turn off ACPI in ME or install XP !! ;)