Hi,

I am posting about a problem that has been driving me crazy for the last 4 months. I have heard good things about this site, so thought I would give it a shot. I just about gave up.

Long story short, I damaged IE7 and found out I had to remove Service Pack 3 to delete it. With a lot of trepidation, I finally did. Well got my IE 7 back working again, reinstalled Service pack 3. Everything should be fine but it wasn't.

I can't get my volume back. The sounds device page where you set volume is grayed out. I have tried everything under the sun and finally gave up a few weeks ago. So here I am again refreshed and taking another stab at giving my computer a voice once again.

I found I had 2 options, that so far neither worked. I did all the extracting the volume from my cd and the XY thing in registry and a load of other methods, then tried what seemed to be the only 2 methods that would stand a chance.

Either slip stream my sata drives into a copy of my OS using Nlite, or set my bios to IDE mode.

I have tried both and either I am doing something wrong or it just doesnt work. Inside bios I changed what I thought would set my hard drive to IDE mode but it hasn't worked. As for the slip streaming, I am not sure if I am evening doing it right, or if I have the right drives and the right format of the drives, since I have heard they needed to be text format? I made 4 copies of my OS with the sata drives inserted into the OS Copy, and the computer still can not find my hard drive.

I have been trying to get inot my original installation disc's Repair Console. As I assume this is the only shot I have at getting my volume back.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am using Windoes XP home Service Pack 3, IE 7, avg Anti-virus, My computer is a Dell XPS Generation 2, the service tag ID will give the specifics at the Dell site if you need it. The ID Number is: D9D2041

Thanks in advance for any help.... Dave

I am unclear about what you have tried, because the bits you say you have tried have nothing to do with the sound, making the system ide, or changing things in the bios makes no difference to sound AFAIK, there may be some freak thing I'm unaware of, but I have never heard of these things having any influence on sound.

The fact the sound is greyed out suggests it is no longer installed, have a look in the device manager for any conflicts, click on Start - Control Panel - System (double click) - Hardware (tab at top) - Device Manager, this will list your hardware, look for any exclamation marks against any devices, if there are any report back saying what they are marked against.

The 1st thing to try is to reinstall the drivers, go Here and download the latest drivers for your system, start with the audio drivers, with luck it will be that simple, see how you go with that.

Hi,

Thanks for the quick response. I am sorry that I was so vague, but I really do mean I tried everything. And couldn't remmeber all I tried it I wanted to.

I have already tried updaing the drivers and such.

See when I deleted service pack 3, it somehow messed up my volume. I was told to extract the volume from my XP Home cd, which I tried and thought I did successfully. I since tried to get into my Windows XP CD to try and enter the repair console, and of course the CD is not standard with Sata Drives, so it doesn't find my hard drive.

All I do know is, when I did the above, I lost my volume. I have re-installed the sound devices, updated them, updated the drivers, tried new sound devices and all. I finally felt my only chance to get back my volume was to enter the windows repair console.

I can't get in to it. I have tried the 2 methods mentioned in my first post. And I just don't know if I am doing the slip stream correctly or using the wrong Sata drives or the wrong version of my Sata drives.

I too didn't understand why my volume got lost afterwards, but I did try everything to do with the audio drives and the audio device I have on my computer. The very last time, I tried somethign with my audio, it gave me an error message saying it couldn't run volume control because there were no mixers on my computer, but there were mixers on my computer.

I even tried downloading a new volume control that said it replaced windows boringn one, and when I tried to install it it said I couldn't because I had no mixers.

This has baffled me for months, and I have finally been directed to try and enter my repair console as my only and last hope.

So that is what I am trying to do, if you have idea how to help me get into my Windows CD repair console I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks again in advance... Dave

You didn't lose your volume, your lost your sound card. Volume is related to your sound card, it is not a stand alone function.

Are there any yellow or red marks in Device Manager (as 8210GUY asked)? If yes, then the sound card driver is not installed correctly.

The first thing to try is to uninstall your sound card from Devie Manager, then reboot. XP will detect it and reinstall the drivers. That in itself may fix the problem.

Otherwise, I looked at the Dell web site using the service tag you provided and it looks like you have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card. The only "driver" I see is a Patch/Upgrade, I'm not sure that is the complete driver, just a patch to the existing driver. So if there is a problem with the existing driver, a patch may not fix it.
Try downloading and installing the Audigy 2 driver from the Creative site, see if that fix4es the problem.

But first, answer the question about the state of your audio in Device Manager.

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the response. To answer your question, there was never any yellow or red exclamation point signs until I started trying to fix my volume.

I did try updating and replacing, I went through the delete and re-detect stage with them as you mentioned, only when I started trying different methods like using a new sound device, I even at one point upgraded to Audigy 4, of course this was after all the updates that I tried and was unsuccessful with, this is when I seen incompatible signs in the device manager.

I immediately either removed the incompatible ones or disabled them. Even had a few that I tried to use crash my system like maestro somehting or another. Like I siad I am sorry I don't recall all the exact specifics, but it has been over a 4 or 5 month span and I have tried almost everything under the sun.

This is the reason I feel like I am at the last resort. I am not even sure getting into the repair console will do what I am expecting, but at this point, I have tried everything else.

If you have some other idea for me to try please let me know I will try anything at this point. I really appreciate any time you take to help me. I hate being without sound it is so annoying

Here is a something to NOTE that I remember now, one of the things I was trying to do lead me into the add remove programs where you install new windows components, the windows components wizard I believe it was called.

When I went in to locate the windows media components, it was not present in the list. And I forget where now but my computer listed my cd rom as the media. I am a little blurry on this , I know there was a valid reason why I was checking into this I just can't remember right now.

Just tried so many things, a lot of it I was instructed to do from a lot help sites.

Thanks in advance... Dave

See here, see if it helps booting the CD: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/syst...TS/Y4342A00.pdf

Thanks for your help Rich,

I will post back 1 way or the other, as soon as I have the time to give it another go.

I appreciate your time.. Thanks Dave

Hi Rich,

Well I went to do as instructed, I found my Drivers and Utilities Dell ResourceCD.

Which contains: Device drivers, Diagnostics and utilities & computer documentation

I booted off of it and the the option to create a sata raid floppy diskette was not there.

The only choices were:

Run Graphics Adapter Advanced Diagnostics
Run the 32 bit Dell Diagnostics
Run the 3com Nic Configuration Utilies/Diag
Open a DOS session
Reboot the system
Quit without any action, (Return to DOS)

I do have a floppy disk on my computer, but following these instructions, I do not see the option it tells me to choose.

Awaiting your advice & Ideas.... Thanks Dave

I don't see any way around it then if that doesn't work. You could try installing the Recovery Console in Windows XP which is described here, but I suspect you will get the same problem, not being able to access the hard drive, though maybe since it's actually booting from the hard drive, that will not be the case.

I do this on all my XP installs.

How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP

Hi Rich,

As it happens, while you posted I was reading this exact article.

I do get this message when trying to install the console from the CD: You can't do it because the version on the computer is newer than the one on the cd.

So I was trying to install the console as a start up option.

I have all the info pages printed out and I am going to try this soon. I do have a question though.

This article tells of how to intregrate Service Pack 2 files into the windows Operating folder, but I have Service Pack 3.

Should I just do the steps using the service pack 2 as it says or is there another info page on service pack 3 being intregrated?

Thanks again for all your help Rich......................... Dave

You should use SP3. The article was written before SP3 was available.

Instead of following the MS directions, do the following, easier, faster and works very well, I've done it many times.

The simplest way to create a Bootable Windows XP Pro or Home Installation CD Slipstreamed with SP2 or SP3 is to use Autostreamer. You point to your XP Pro/Home CD, the SP2/SP3 Service Pack .exe file, give it a path to write the .iso file to and off it goes. In 5 or 10 minutes you have a .iso file that you can burn to CD with almost any CD burner program you want to use. I used Roxio 7. There is a good freeware burner called DeepBurner which will do this also.

Here is the link to Autostreamer: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-...ostreamer.shtml

You can download the SP2 .exe here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en
You can download the SP3 .exe here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

An excellent alternative is nLite. It allows you to merge SP2/SP3/Windows Updates into a new XP CD image that you can install from. Takes a bit of fiddling with but worth the effort since it also allows you to pre-answer all the questions asked during install so all you have to do is boot the new CD, select where you want to install, format or not and go to lunch. When you come back the install is finished and your are at the latest Service Pack and Update level. See here:
http://www.nliteos.com/

If you have Vista, then give Vlite a try:
http://www.vlite.net/

Use this site to get the MS updates: http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/

You can also get updates from an MS site but it takes more work: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/saveupdates.htm

Hi, I'm really sorry for a slow reply, have been extremely ill (more so than normal) the last few days, I see Ztruker has been taking good care of you though, now I am still pretty messed up, so apologies if I repeat an earlier suggestion, but I have 1 thing to check, I have only ever seen it once, I have no idea why it happened or anything, but I offer it incase it helps.

Now being some years back I can't recall exact names\procedures, but hopefully you will be able to get the gist of this thought, and be able to find what I mean.
Under the settings, possibly device properties, something that gets into such areas, and\or to do with such sound devices, the bits I am trying to direct you to are in drop down boxes, within these drop down boxes it will list, and allow you to select which audio device you want to use for each option\setting (there are a few), in my case, however it happened, the system had swapped the audio device to my modem, I selected my sound device from ALL the drop down boxes as appropriate and was good to go again, I hope it's as simple as that for you, if not I doubt I am in any state to guide further at this point, hope you get it sorted anyway.