Onboard Soundcard Stopped Working?

[smirks]

Yesterday my sound was working no problem.
Today I couldn't connect to my internet radio station, so I went through troubleshooting and reinstalled Windows Media player.
I cannot play sounds from any program, and the speaker icon has gone missing from my system tray.
I have so far:
- Made sure that my onboard sound is enabled in BIOS
- Downloaded the latest audio drivers and installed them.
- Followed three of the solutions here: http://www.geocities.com/mmsystem002/ because I got this error: "MMSYSTEM002: A device id has been used that is out of range for your system."

The only thing that I can think of to do next is *shudder* format and reinstall, and see if that fixes it. Any other ideas?

If it makes any difference, I have a Soyo SY-7ma-B motherboard and am running Win98SE.

[dl65]

smirks.....Have you gone to your control panel and checked to see if all the sound devices are enabled.....
Go to the system in control panel and open up and check all sound settings and perhaps just replacing the speaker icon will solve the dilema.

dl65  

[smirks]

I'm afraid not. Nothing appears to be wrong with my sytem settings. The Audio part of my Multimedia settings is grayed-off, so I can't touch anythign there (coincidentally, the show speaker box is checked).

[Raptor]

Did this happen after you have installed the new drivers? If not, can you tell us what you have done to your soundcard or systems before you shut down your computer yesterday?

You could try to install a new videocard. Disable the onboard soundcard first.

[smirks]

This happened before I installed the drivers. I wasn't doing anything abnormal before I shut down the computer last night. I downloaded a few mp3s and was listening to them while checking e-mails and such. This is a family computer, so there's a chance that someone used it before I got on today, although I doubt anyone who used it could have done anything to the drivers or windows software. They just don't know enough. I'm thinking that either I have some corrupted files, or my soundcard is going kaput.

[Raptor]

The one's not knowing what they are doing are usually the most dangerous ones.

http://hardwarehell.com/discus/messages/1204/1823.html?1013995693

This might help you solve your problem. - I cannot help you, you will have to wait for the more experienced members to come online.

[MalikTous]

I'd go into Device manager/Hardware list in the System applet and remove all audio devices, then put the CD you got with your MB in and reinstall the Soyo audio driver. It sounds like either the driver got corrupted or the mainboard chipset function took a powder. As Soyo has turned in a less than stellar performance record in my experience, I wouldn't be surprised.

Worst case, get yourself an Ensoniq/SB PCI64 or better soundcard with its latest drivers and disable Soyo's mainboard audio. A suitable soundcard should be reasonably low cost, you don't need an Audigy or other fancy one.

[smirks]

Okay...here's something interesting:
I tried to re-install the drivers for the fifth time, and the install wizard seems to think that my soundcard is disabled (it's not, checked the BIOS). However, windows then detects said soundcard and tries to find drivers for it.

Grr.

[smirks]

Oh, nevermind. I got the sucker working. When Windows device manager popped up, I went along with it, set it to look for all drivers on my computer, found the soundcard, and went ahead with an install. Frankly, I didn't expect it to work, because it asked me to pop in the Win98 setup disk, and I've never had to do that to install drivers for anything on this sytem, but it did. *shrugs* Go figure.

[VoidAngel]

Really?  I've often had to use my Windows disk to install drivers.  Odd that you haven't.

[Raptor]

You can also install drivers independently, that can be what Smirks has been doing all along.