well i don't claim to know much about sound cards, but here's what i do if my sound suddenly stops working, maybe it could help you:
well, i use XFce as my desktop environment, and if it craps up (which is always a result of me trying to edit its config files!) it does odd things. once, it stopped my sound from working!
basically what i did was i opened up 'aumix' from a command prompt, and turned all the volumes up, then i opened up 'kmix' from the command line, and turned up all the volumes on it as well. for some reason i need to do this using both sets of faders, and i need to do it in that order too. After that i can just use kmix for any sound card level tweaking.
Now the very fact of seeing faders in either of those applets means your sound card works. If you see no faders, then your sound card does not work. If this is the case, it may be a problem with the block device file assigned to your sound card (this will likely be /dev/dsp, or will be aliased to /dev/dsp) and you might need to create this block device. There's an older thread in the UNIX forum where voidmain tells me exactly how to do this, but i forget exactly what it's called.
Once, i resorted to deleting the entire contents of /home/calum/.xfce/ (which contains all the XFce config stuff) because i could not get any faders to appear in aumix and hey! it actually worked! i think it has something to do with aumix automatically installing the proper block device file, but i might well be talking out of my arse, so if somebody else can help then go for it.
As i say, i know very little, and that was it! so if this is of no help, then at least i tried.
also, if this problem occurs in windows also, then i would guess that it's actually a hardware problem, as hinted at above.
i would strongly recommend fiddling about in your BIOS settings, btw. just because you have never done this does in no way mean that it is not the problem.
Just remember though that a pencil and a notepad are your best friends when it comes down to BIOS fiddling...
hey and not only that, if you got a message saying you removed the sound card, and then checked to see if it was still there later and it was, then i reckon you might be looking at a dry joint, which is when a badly soldered connection comes loose and causes unpredictable open circuits. This is something that computer geeks generally do not like to muck around with, for obvious reasons, but to my mind (and this is an uninformed and generally inexperienced when it comes to hardware type mind) i don't see why everybody's so afraid of a circuit board and a soldering iron.
[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
