multimedia audio controller issue

[howie2424]

I suffered what I thought was a minor crash the other day and when I rebooted there was no sound. I reinstalled the sound card drivers and still nothing. In Device Manager the 'Multimedia Audio Controller' item has a yellow question mark, indicating the drivers for the device have not been installed. When I tried reinstalling them from the CD via Device Manager it says windows can't find the software for that device on the CD. Very strange. Any ideas? It's a one year old SB Audigy sound card and I'm running XP Home. Thanx for any help.

[Panama Red]

Try removing the sound card in device manager and reboot. XP should find it again as new hardware and assign a driver. You can then update the driver to a newer one if necessary.

[howie2424]

thanks Panama Red. I tried uninstalling the sound card via Device Manager and the system crashed on all 3 attempts before the uninstalll was complete. Next I tried uninstalling via the installation CD. It gets to 65 per cent complete and then froze on all 3 attempts.

I tried putting the card in another PCI slot to see if Windows would see it and install the driver.It did, but while installing it says it can't find sfman32.dll, which I find for it in the windows sys32 folder. Then it can't find wdmaud.drv which I find for it in the same windows folder. Next it says it can't find a file called ctac32k which I find for it on the install CD. After that it proceeds for a few seconds and then the whole system crashes. 3 tries, same result.

Oddly before the installation starts it tells me that the drivers I'm trying to install are not digitally signed for XP compatibility, which is strange as they are on the SB Audigy CD. I'm still stumped, any more ideas?

[Panama Red]

I've tried to check some info at the Creative site, but they must be having server problems. Can't connect. What's the complete model number of the card. Or complete name.

[howie2424]

hmmm, the card itself says SB Audigy model SB0090 but the manual suggests its a SB Audigy model SB1394.

[glc]

Have you tried doing a system restore to a point before the crash?

[howie2424]

sorry for the delay in getting back to this, been away for 10 days.

I tried the system restore but it accomplished nothing as the earliest restore point was subsequent to the crash.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks.