sound card problem

Hi. I have a Latitude D600 Dell Laptop.
I had some problems recently and after running scandisk, I finally got my computer back. It did find a lot of bad sectors.
However, absolutely everything is working, except my sound. Device Manager shows yellow exclamation for multimedia audio controller. Everytime I try to install it, it says invalid data. I've also tried in safe mode and tried uninstalling everything that was under the sound section within device manager.

I tried installing within device manager and pointing to the install path. I tried installing by running the setup program that Dell provides for this on there website. I have tried downloading the drivers direct. I have tried to install it from many different sources and many different ways. I even looked up my motherboard chipset and tried installing the drivers that way.

Same problem each time. Please help me. Could the sound card be bad?

 

Welcome to Major Geeks :wave
Yes, the sound card could be bad. But there's some things you could still try. Since the hard drive had bad sectors, there's a good chance that this is what is causing the problem somehow. If you have your XP installation CD (I'm assuming you have Windows XP), put it in the drive and click Exit when the big blue window opens. Then click Start, click Run, and type cmd and press Enter. A black DOS type window will open. Type sfc /purgecache and press Enter. This shouldn't take more than a minute or two. When it finishes, type sfc /scannow and press Enter and let it run. It may take some time. If it prompts for the CD and the CD is in the drive, just click retry. When it finishes, type exit and press Enter, then reboot and install the chipset software first, then reboot and try to install the sound driver again. You should also run a full diagnostic on the hard drive. You can download the free diagnostic tools from the hard drive manufacturer's web site (not Dell). Run their extended advanced tests. If the drive passes, and the sfc didn't help, try a safe re-install of Windows. If that doesn't work, then the sound chip may have failed. Luckily, you can buy a simple USB device for sound that are under $20 just about anywhere or on Ebay for even less. Here's some links:
Dell D600 chipset drivers http://support.dell.com/support/dow...1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=27&fileid=149851
Dell D600 audio drivers (I'm sure you already have this) http://support.dell.com/support/dow...-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=3&fileid=118248
How-to guide for safe repair install of WinXP http://www.fujitsu-siemens.co.uk/rl/servicesupport/techsupport/software/windows/xp/Repair.htm
(this guide leaves out the obvious first step of booting to the Windows CD and pressing any key when it says "Press any key to boot to CD....")

I hope this helps! Good luck, and keep us posted!

(BTW- the sfc commands have a space before the slash / if you don't use the space, the commands won't work)

 

Thanks so much. I will give this a try. I have a 1 year old and a 2.5 year old so my time is limited due to taking care of them. I will let you know.

 

I did everything, but the diagnostics and reinstall. I don't have time for it right now unfortunately. Also the hitachi harddrive that I have only seems to offer a harddrive diagnostics and not a full diagnostics of the computer. I'm not sure if that will help me with the sound card (?). Plus I have to create a bootable cd and this computer doesn't have one. I do have the option to use my husbands computer to download and create the bootable CD.

I do have the same problem though. Just in case, I did find a usb external sound card for like $6.99 and $5.00 for shipping so I ordered it.

Thanks

 

Re: sound card problem - FIXED

Yeah it's fixed. I got an idea from an old post on a techie forum to delete the contents of C:\WINDOWS\DRIVER CACHE\i386

After this, when I tried to install the sound card driver from device manager, it finally came back with some errors that it couldn't find some files located in
C:\WINDOWS\system32\i386

I did have these files (there was about 4-5 files it was looking for), however not in this windows\system32\i386 directory.

I just created i386 off of windows\system32 and copied the files over and was able to get through the sound card driver installation.

It was successful.