No Sound on Windows 10

roeelivne.w

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Sep 14, 2017
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After my computer froze during a casual FIFA18 playing session, I restarted my PC, and it came up with no sound at all. The following issues are present:


Red cross over the sound icon on the taskbar.

Under devmgmt, there are no devices under Audio Devices except for my NVidia HDMI/GPU, which I don't use.

Under devmgmt, there are two instances of High Definition Audio Controller, one of them with a yellow triangle present.
I isolated the faulty yellow triangle one to be the onboard controller, but apparently it is not linked to a device.

I can't uninstall either HD Audio Controllers. The both come back 5 seconds later no matter what I try.

DxDiag lists no audio devices at all. Nothing is recognizable.

I have always had Realtek as my default audio driver. MoBo CD is useless, chipset drivers are installed, and Realtek HD Audio installation seems to work but in the end almost no driver files are present, let alone some audio manager UI or exe files which are non-existent.

Running an updated W10. Mobo is an Asus M150-C.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
NVidia video cards contain a separate sound device for HDMI. Installing video card drivers often automatically change the HDMI sound device to your default sound device. You can manage multiple sound devices in the Windows control panel.

The device manager yellow triangle seems to indicate the only sound driver installed is the one for the NVidia video card.

Intel Graphics Accelerator Driver contains Intel sound driver if you are using the motherboard HDMI video output.

Then there is the Realtek Audio Driver for the motherboard Realtek ALC887 7.1-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC.
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/B150M-C/HelpDesk_Download/

Check Window control panel for management of multiple sound devices.
 
Thanks for the reply.
My exact problem is that windows shows only one available driver, the nvidia hdmi one, and no other driver can be installed. The realtek device that was on the devmgmt is now completely gone, replaced by a windows hd sound controller under other devices. I can't update the device to a driver of my own, because windows 'determines I have the latest driver'.
Realtek installation just runs through, prompts a restart, and after the reboot everything is still the same.

To make things simple, I disabled the Nvidia audio device drivers. Now there are no audio devices at all, except for that windows-yellow triangle-hd audio controller, and both dxdiag and the output and input audio dialogs show no audio device at all.
 


Nothing seems to be working.
The onboard sound just isn't working. Plugging in our out anything from any headphone or mic jack is not responsive in any way.
When trying to install the realtek driver, the installation runs fine, but after copying all relevant file to the Realtek folder, it deletes all of them except for RltkUpd64.exe. Which does nothing in turn when I try running it.

What I am missing is not management of multiple sound devices, because everything worked just fine two days ago.
The PC doesn't have any memory of 2 sound devices like it used to, but only one, the nVidia sound device. The realtek sound device is completely gone, and no driver or Mobo/chipset update does the trick.

What I think is missing - the yellow triangle HD Audio Controller presumes it has the latest driver. If I could override that presumption and uninstall its driver and have it move to the audio section in devmgmt and install the correct driver, I believe that could do the trick. But trying to uninstall it really does nothing useful, as the device returns 5 seconds later, and when manually selecting a driver, it just says it already has the latest driver installed.

I'm afraid the only way forward is a clean install of windows?