Hi guys,

Can you guys help me? It has been bugging me for sometime now. I reformatted my PC after it crashed (XP keeps on freezing) and installed all the necessary motherboard drivers after. The installation went smoothly and the device manager show no conflicting drivers or whatsoever.

However, i noticed that i am hearing no audio. I checked the following:

Control Panel -> Sounds & Audio Devices
- Speaker Settings is grayed out (meaning unclickable)
- Device Volume is grayed out

- In the Sounds tab, even the 'play' button is grayed out.
- In the Audio tab, both Sound playback and Sound recording are showing no options.

I tried some troubleshooting by going to Accessories -> Entertainment -> Volume Control and tried to place the volume icon into the task manager, it is saying that i have no audio hardware installed.

I visited the MSI & RealTek sites, searched, downloaded and installed the latest SiS 745 and AC97 drivers but to no avail. I am also installing the chipset driver first before the audio drivers. Onboard audio is also enabled in BIOS. I also even tried reformatting twice. The problem still persists.

These are the items under Device Managers -> Sound, Video & Game Controllers
Audio Codecs
Legacy Audio Drivers
Media Control Devices
Video Codecs

I notice no instance of any RealTek drivers in that.

Note that my PC was already on WinXP before i reformatted it, so it *should not have* given me any problems.

---------------------------------
MSI 745 Ultra Motherboard
-Supports Socket A AMD Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron processor up to 2600+
-SIS 745 Chipset
-Realtek ALC Series AC'97 Audio Drivers
- Support model: All MSI MB with onboard Realtek® Avance ALC Series audio codec controller.

The easiest way to see if this is a driver/windows problem and not a hardware one is to boot using a knoppix/ubuntu LiveCd, since these are intializing the sound devices without any drivers.

Hmm. Thanks for the info. Exactly what I need for troubleshooting.

Uhm, where can I get that?

www.ubuntulinux.org & www.knopper.net/knoppix/

Any idea or short background on what this software do?