When I click on properties for my laptop’s onboard sound card, device manager initially tells me for that the “device is working properly”, but when I go to the card’s properties tab and look at multimedia devices, it says that “the driver is enabled but has not been started”. I installed a friend’s USB sound card, and the same problem occurred with it. When I go to audio devices in control panel, it ways there are none, although I can see them in device manager and in the system information console.
I’ve googled the error message, and there seems to be many frustrated people looking for a solution to this. It’s not specific to the model of computer or even the operating system. I’m using a presario x1000 with windows xp home/sp2 and a soundmax onboard card, but people using various makes of desktops and notebooks with both onboard and add-on cards from different manufacturers, running xp home, pro, and even windows 2000 seemed to have had the same problem.
It’s not hardware issue. I ran the directx diagnostic tool from the system information console, and got this error message when I ran the test on the direct sound tab: “DirectSound test results: Failure at step 3 (DirectSoundCreate): HRESULT = 0x88780078 (No driver)” No surprise, considering the other error messages, but when I tested direct music on the music tab, the test tune played and sounded fine for both the onboard and USB cards?!? Go figure.
I tried the solutions that worked for some of the people, but so far no luck. I’ve restored my bios settings to default (there’s no specific control for enabling or disabling the built-in components on this motherboard, so that was the best I could do), and anyway, the direct music test shows that it’s not a bios problem.
I also uninstalled and reinstalled the sound cards, using the same drivers that had worked before, disabled and reenabled them, tried to enable and/or manually start all the audio-related services from the console and msconfig, and even tried to add a “device” line for the card’s main driver to the config.sys file (OK, that was probably silly, but so is this problem).
Some of the posters said that their problem had gone away when they reinstalled the PnP enumerator, but my PnP is working fine. There were suggestions to remove and then reinstall all sound items with the device manager, but I couldn’t uninstall anything but the cards themselves – the codecs, etc., seem to be permanently glued in place. I doubt that’s the answer – some people on the other forums said they’d tried that and it hadn’t helped.
It’s definitely a windows problem, as a number of people said that they’d had it occur on a dual boot machine and had sound with their other OS, but not windows. So I googled the phrase for the microsoft site and got no solutions there either, although there were old posts suggesting that the problem may go back as far as windows 95.
I’ve tried examining the registry and comparing the settings to a backup I made a few months ago before the problem occurred, but I can’t see any differences, and don’t want to mess up my installed programs by merging the old reg file completely into my current one, as everything else is working OK. I also don’t want to reinstall windows with all the grief that involves, and besides, some posters said they’d tried that and even it didn’t help.
My apologies for such a long post, but it’s a complicated problem and I wanted to save helpful people from suggesting things I’ve already tried. The $64 question is how the hell to convince windows xp to “start” a driver that it says has been installed properly. Anyone have an answer?
Thanks in advance!
Jim