HI there,

I thought you guys would be interested in the quick fix I found on the net RE: loss of sound (due to the upgrade to c-media audio driver via windows update) and the recovery of your old RealTek AC 97 driver.

http://answers.google.com/answers/th...48586#comments

I was up and running in two minutes. Hope it helps,

Jemton. :cheesy:

Thanks a million. This problem drove me close to the brink of madness.
You saved me, the computer, and the window from destruction.
Now I owe the group one, so I hope somebody somewhare has a problem I can help them solve.
If they are running Microsoft, I probably won't have to wait long.

J O

Thank You For Solving This Problem - I Fixed 3 Of My Pc's

Why Doesnt C-media Put This Info Or A Patch On Their Site!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Will This Problem Ever Come Back And What Causes It?

Thanks Again

Its all very well resolving the problem when it is in XP but once you have done so why not go and do a Windows XP back-up into a nominated separate partition, preferably on a second HD. Partition Magic 8 is best and easiest for partitioning drives in a sensible fashion and it does much else besides - I'd be lost without it. Once you have the back-up stored away, anything that goes wrong can be easily corrected - back-up your own stuff onto a CD or two or three if you can first so that you can update the XP back-up. When using the back-up facility I would advise electing to choose what to back up rather than letting it rip. It is better than the restore function and overrides it in fact. I offer this advice from personal experience with the specific problem in this thread.

Just wanted to comment on that one post a few posts back, referencing a post that referenced an Experts-Exchange solution, for Win98. The solution on that site was to figure out your sound card model and get and install the drivers for it. Well thing is, I would think they wouldn't install after you have the C-Media ones installed - even on Win98 you should have to remove the C-Media ones first. Hopefully those with XP will know that if they did this, it would just find and install the drivers again, so it isn't that simple in XP, so you have to do it in such a way that XP won't put back the C-Media drivers before you get the chance to install your model's previous driver. My way does that, even if a bit tedious - believe me, I tried it their way when I was trying to figure this one out and it didn't work, so hopefully those with XP will know to not follow the Win98 solution, as XP would always put back the C-Media drivers. Win98 doesn't, and so it's a little easier. I didn't go the hard road for no reason.

That said, the idea of having XP installed on a separate partition or hard drive in the same computer is a great idea to take care of issues like this, though you don't necessarily need Partition Magic to do it unless you want a smaller area than the entirety of a second hard drive or smaller than the rest of a single hard drive partitioned - but otherwise, just pop in an XP CD while booted up in XP - it will ask you during the setup where to install it. I have done it on another computer, just not the one with this sound issue. If you can boot from a 3rd medium, like a Bart PE disc (www.nu2.nu), you could copy the system32 directory from the good to the bad with no issues, as long as you had every application that you had installed on the bad one also installed on the good one. Otherwise you'd have some programs that will have files, but no registry entries, and so will no longer work and will need to be re-installed. Without a PE disc you could still do it: copy the files from the good to the bad, but put them in a temp directory. Boot into the good side, then copy the files out of the temp directory into the Windows directory. More cumbersome, but effective nonetheless. Good post.

I want to THANK YOU FOR SOLUTION, I was soooo tired of that pop up at startup. It put me back in control without erorr now. all I need to do was go to reg and delete the three files CMaudio, C-media and Cmcplus.

Not a problem, thanks for the praise. I just hope you uninstalled the C-Media driver and re-installed your old one and did a reboot to be sure C-Media didn't come back - I thought I had beat this one a couple of times before my final solution, only to find it come back on me after a reboot. If you had sound the entire time, but just had the startup error, all you had to do was delete the cmaudio string in HKLM\Software\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.

But this is something XP will always do when you log on, for those that may be wondering why it always re-installs at startup, is a hardware detection. If any driver files are missing for devices it detects, if it has the files, it will reload the files (if it doesn't have them, it prompts you to tell it where they are). Usually this is good. In this case, if the C-Media wasn't working, it can be bad, if C-Media is removed without re-installing a good driver, since XP will be auto-reloading bad files. But if C-Media was working, just giving the cmicnfg.cpl error, just get rid of the Run string for cmaudio to keep it from checking for that on startup and giving the error, as the driver itself is good. Anyway, glad I could help.

I still think PM8 is worth the money, especially as large/second HDDs are the norm these days. But I am now more interested in AdawareSE set-up. I thought somebody in this thread gave a detailed set-up but I cannot trace it as it was perfect for me and I want to copy it out for posterity. Any feedback out there?

:cheesy: THANK YOU!!! I'm NO expert but followed navyjax2's instructions and all fixed

I followed as many steps as i could to delete everything
I went through regedit and deleted all strings and traces
Now, i dont use my on-board sound, i use my sound card, my sound works fine but the damn error messege on boot is annoying as all hell
I went into BIOS and disabled all on-board properties, and drivers, but still get the error messege
I went into msconfig and unchecked it, but it just comes back up

can anyone help me?