System does not recognise sound card after bios update

Question

Can anyone help, I resently updated the bios on my Inspiron 1501 note book running Vista Business.   After the bios flash was completed and the system restarted vista reloaded all the drivers excpet the sound card I have tried without much success to reistall the Sigmatel HD sound driver but this fails saying the system does not upport the driver.   When running the device manager there is a unknown PCI device and no matter what I do I can not get it to load a driver for it.   I have had some success in getting Vista to load a generic HD Audio driver by trying to reverse the bios update it doesnt revert as the system blue screens crashes and when it restarts the sound works, but when I restart after I shut down the computer it starts all over again. Plug n Play syas new hardware found and trys to installs what it thinks is a PCI device.   Please can anyone help.

Neilstapley350 · Answer

I have a Inspiron 1501 running Vista Business. After recently updated the bios to the 2.6.1 version after it restarted the system could no reconise the sound card. I have attempted to reinstall the sigmatel driver but its telling me that its not the correct driver for the system.

When the system boots Plug n Play attempts to find a driver for a PCI dvice but ails to find one. I have tried to manually search for a driver and brings back the following error message.

"windows found driver software for your device but encountered an error while attempting to install it

High defination audio controller.

Sometimes the device has worked but when I have had to restart it again fails to load.

Message Edited by Neilstapley350 on 10-18-2007 06:50 AM

jwhiteheadcc · Answer

You need to completely remove the device entries. Use RegEdit (if you know how), or just do this (safer):
1) Open Device Manager. Start -> Run -> devmgmt.msc.
2) In the top, click on View -> Show hidden devices and this will show disabled/uninstalled devices.
3) Find all references to your hardware and remove them.
4) Reboot.
5) Reinstall the drivers when Windows asks.

If this doesn't work, you can add these additional steps. Try disabling the device in the BIOS first, and run the device driver update from Dell right before rebooting in #4, reenabling the device, and letting Windows reinstall it's drivers. This will probably solve most of your driver issues. The only problem is that some devices aren't exactly easy to figure out how to disable in BIOS, if possible at all!

Normally, I'd say that it might be Vista not liking the driver since it's written for XP but it appears that you got it working before you updated the BIOS. Please tell us if it works and what you did - it's useful if someone else has this problem!

Good luck, Joe

Message Edited by jwhiteheadcc on 10-24-2007 08:59 AM

Neilstapley350 · Answer

Thanks I had already tried doing that to no avail. I have actually managed to get it working but not sure how. Everytime I log on to Vista not it rtys to search for a generic PCI device driver if I cancel it the sound card works if i try and let Vista search for the driver it wants to look for, it disables the sound card and I have to try and play with it for an hour removing drivers loading then again messing with the device manager etc before it starts to work again.

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System does not recognise sound card after bios update

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