Problem: A user requested help with the sound on her machine. It happened to be another one of those brand-x machines that I love so much, loaded with parts that I've never seen or heard of. The sound circuits were integrated so I opened the box to determine the manufacturer of the mother board. It wasn't easy but I found the manufacturer's web site and downloaded the audio driver. At this point you're probably asking, "Why is he giving the solution under the problem statement?" Well, because I haven't gotten to the real problem yet :o( .... I started the installation of the audio driver and began to pack my stuff to leave, when the install process abruptly ended and the system crashed. When it came back up, of course the audio still didn't work. In addition, both the CD reader and the CD-RW devices went yellow in Device Manager. I unpacked my stuff and spent the next 3 hours trying to reload the CD and CD-RW drivers. Nothing worked. I had to revisit the machine the next day. You're right, the drivers didn't magically load by themselves over night. Going on advice I found on the internet, I deleted both devices and let the machine rediscover them. Of course the plug and play process loaded the same old driver and I got the same old message: "The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)". Now for the real killer; I deleted the devices again and decided to reboot and let the devices get rediscovered during system initialization. The machine came up as far as the logon prompt and permanently hung (please shoot me ...... now......)
Solution: I decided to try Safe Mode. However, when I hit the F8 key I didn't get the normal black screen with Safe Mode and the other choices. I got another short menu of choices for selecting a boot device. Oddly enough it let me choose the CD drive at this point, so I inserted the XP CD and ran a Setup Repair. This allowed me to logon again (whew), after which I was able to reinstall SP2 and get back to normal. Unfortunately this only got me back to square one, with no audio driver. By this time the user was happy to live without sound. That was good enough for me!
After days like this I always hope it's true what they say ..... "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger"
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