I have a desktop running Vista Ultimate. It's almost a year old. The past month I installed a 500 gig hard drive in addition to the original 80 gig. I transferred Vista to the new drive and installed Ubuntu on the 80. Last week the 500 drive failed and I removed it from the machine. I reinstalled Vista to another partition on the 80. So far so good.

When I booted up I noticed the sound was absent and the pci modem card wasn't working. (I have dial up.) I removed the pci modem card and ordered a replacement.
I noticed a telephone jack on the rear of the case that I never noticed before and doesn't appear on the device list. I have always used a pci card modem.

I had orig ionally used a powered speaker plugged into the sound port on the back. I CHECKED the software and it is what I thought it should be. Checking further I found a sound port on the front (labelled headset) was working. However when I unplugged the powered speaker from the back it had a high volume 60 cycle hum) It won't WORK on any of the ports. I looked at the device list and don't see any faults.

Except for the sound and modem all else seems to be working normally I am a little puzzled by all this and about to conclude I have a hardware problem.

What's the commonality in all this?
Any advice appreciated.Try re-installing all your drivers starting with the MBoard/chipset drivers FIRST...Thanks for your kind response.
I think you may be right about the system drivers.

I turned the machine on full of confidence. It gave me a message first thing: A hardware change has occurred, and to fix it; put in the Windows DISC and restart. When one sees the 'Repair Windows option' select it. However the Windows disc never loads and even after I changed the bios to boot from CD it goes ahead and tries to boot from Windows and hangs almost immediately. I am now resting from my labors and the machine is resting too.

I have some ideas;

I think I need a more powerful boot disc. If I can obtain one I'll reformat the drive. Temporarily discarding Ubuntu and my latest install of Vista.

Then with a clean disc I will try to obtain system drivers. This machine I'm using now doesn't have a CD drive but I do have a flash drive. It's an Intel board I need drivers for so they should be available. Using the flash drive I should be able to transport the drivers upstairs to the other puter.

If you see a fatal flaw in all this, or can suggest a more EXPEDITIOUS scheme I will forever be in your debt.

Meanwhile the ice is melting a bit so I can mail out my 500 gig drive to either be repaired or returned as is...

Thanks so much for your response.
Ivan Copas
Does the sound output work when you use the Ubuntu Live disk?Thanks for your response.

No the sound doesn't work with Ubuntu.

I was wondering; would reinstalling Windows REPLACE all the drivers?

It seems my powered speaker has gone bad. Haven't tested it separately yet.

I can't get Ubuntu to recognize the modem either. I have been thinking it was the wrong kind of modem (A 56K V.92) Maybe not.)Quote from: copas on February 02, 2009, 09:30:36 AM

Thanks for your response.

No the sound doesn't work with Ubuntu.

I was wondering; would reinstalling Windows replace all the drivers?

It seems my powered speaker has gone bad. Haven't tested it separately yet.

I can't get Ubuntu to recognize the modem either. I have been thinking it was the wrong kind of modem (A 56K V.92) Maybe not.)