Okay guys, I have encountered the dreaded 'No Audio Device' problem. I have a Gigabyte 8IPE1000Pro2 Mobo and I'm using the onboard realtek AC'97 sound card. Now i've been using this fine for years. Well anyways, yesterday i downloaded some Windows Updates, left my computer on all day and finally turned it off for sleep. When i woke up in teh morning, i had no sound when trying to play my movie files. naturally, i thought it was some kinda Codec problem (I was messing around with encoding and stuff the day before). I reinstalled K-lite codec pack but to no avail. I decided to make sure if my sound and all that was turned up, so i went to Sound and Audio Devices and was confronted with the msg "No Audio Device". Now i went to Device Manager and I saw two Microsoft Devices (one said something like Microsoft WDM) with exclaimation marks. I tried updating drivers - didn't work - so i disabled them completely. when i checked again, they had disappeared. I proceeded to disabling and reenabling the Realtek AC'97 Device. I got latest drivers to my Realtek AC'97 card, latest drivers for my chipset, went to BIOS and checked the onboard AC'97 sound option (AUTO/Disable) and so on. I checked the DirectX Diagnostics Utility (dxdiag.exe) and came up with a "Problem getting sound card info" so on. I went to the Sound tab and checked the info there. I clicked on the "test Sound" button and got: "DirectSound test results: Failure at step 3 (DirectSoundCreate): HRESULT = 0x88780078 (No driver)" I went to the music tab and got an error for Microsoft Synthesizer and got an error. tried with the Realtek '97 port as well, my computer crashed and i had to do a hard reset. I then went to Add/Remove programs and uninstalled all the Windows Updates i had installed the day before, but that did nothing (so i reinstalled them again). I can't use System Restore (i turned it off cause i thought i'd never need it before...how ironic...). I've looked all over the net and there are a lot of ppl who have this same problem. I have found no useful suggestions (everyone just says reisntall drivers, go BIOS etc) but none of those work. Most ppl haven't found a solution yet, the ppl who have there computer magically seemed to start getting sound again for some reason. Can someone please help out? Is this Hardware or Software? And will i need to buy a new Sound Card? My friend is lending me his Audigy to test if that works tommorow. ~Jarik

Okay tried a few booting in Safe Mode, uninstalling the driver from there, letting Microsoft install default drivers but to no avail. I also tried installing from my Mboards disk but the installation is full of errors popping up. But i did find something quite interesting. I went to Sound and Audio devices Properties and then hit teh Hardware Tab. I then double clicked on Realtek AC'97 (using the MS drivers) and brought up the dialogue. Device status was "This device is working properly.". Then i hit the properties tab and it had: Audio Devices - realtek AC '97 Audio MIDI Devices - realtek blah blah Mixer Devices - realtek blah blah HOWEVER, when i opend properties on one of them (them being the realtek AC'97 ones) it came up with another dialogue. This stated: "STATUS: Driver enabled but has not been started". This was dittoed for the other two. Does that mean anything? Any ideas how to get the drivers going? Thanks, ~Jarik

Okay, tried my friends Audigy LS - still didn't work. Reinstalled video card and DirectX 9.0c drivers, still didn't work. I'm going to reformat in 2 days and reinstall everything (luckily, my boot drive is on a seperate drive to everything else). I'm really really hoping it ain't hardware and i'm not gonna waste 6 hours reinstalling everything for nothing...