added external esata hard drive --> no sound!

[QuantumPion]

I just bought an external hard drive for backups and whatnot. It has a nice fast esata connector, and my motherboard happens to have a port for it. In order to use the esata port though, I had to enable the Marvell raid controller on my motherboard, which I had disabled previously. My main hard drive is on the regular intel southbridge sata controller.

When I booted into windows, the hard drive was detected and mounted and worked just fine. But, I had no sound from any application. The device manager reported that the sound card was functioning correctly. When I went back to the bios and disabled the marvell raid controller, my sound was back and working fine.

My motherboard is an ASUS P6T deluxe, sound card is a PCI X-fi. Halp!

 

[dexmanone]

you could try reinstalling the audio driver AFTER enabling the external drive. it's been years but had an audio prob similar and it had to do with the order of the devices firing up, or drivers being loaded. sounds like you external drive driver is trumping the sound driver.

 

[QuantumPion]

Maybe but I find that unlikely as windows says the driver is working correctly and applications do try to ouput sound normally, just nothing comes out.

 

[corkyg]

Have you checked all the sound options in Control Panel? Maybe it got set to Mute or the volume is zero?

 

[QuantumPion]

Yes everything indicates the sound should be working but nothing comes out while the Marvell controller is enabled.

 

[RebateMonger]

X-Fi cards are known for having Resource conflicts with certain video cards. It's possible that the same thing is happening when you enable the RAID controller in BIOS. I've seen cases where an add-in RAID card wouldn't co-exist with an AGP video card.

 

[QuantumPion]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
X-Fi cards are known for having Resource conflicts with certain video cards. It's possible that the same thing is happening when you enable the RAID controller in BIOS. I've seen cases where an add-in RAID card wouldn't co-exist with an AGP video card.

That is what I figure, but I don't know how to fix the problem since windows doesn't seem to think there is anything wrong. I guess I can see if there is a bios update for my motherboard, and if that doesn't work I might be able to change the slot the x-fi is in.

 

[Skyzoomer]

Originally posted by: dexmanone
you could try reinstalling the audio driver AFTER enabling the external drive. it's been years but had an audio prob similar and it had to do with the order of the devices firing up, or drivers being loaded. sounds like you external drive driver is trumping the sound driver.

Originally posted by: QuantumPion
Maybe but I find that unlikely as windows says the driver is working correctly and applications do try to ouput sound normally, just nothing comes out.

Maybe don't discount dexmanone's suggestion. The order in which drivers are installed can have a profound effect on what works and what doesn't, regardless of what windows says about the driver working correctly. I used to do video editing and when the video editing card was installed, a precise order of driver installations had to be followed otherwise things would not work correctly. Windows would say all day that things were fine but it lied. (Well maybe it thought things in it's own little world were fine but it did not see the whole picture.)

Before doing that though, (or after doing that and still no sound), did you check the window's sound controls or did you check your driver's sound controls? I had sound problems and the windows sound control (speaker icon by the clock) would not fix it no matter how I set it. Then going into CONTROL PANEL > SOUND MAX provided the setting I needed to get the problem fixed. Note that I said CONTROL PANEL > SOUND MAX, ...not... CONTROL PANEL > SOUND AND AUDIO DEVICES.

Best of luck,
Sky

 

[QuantumPion]

Originally posted by: Skyzoomer

Originally posted by: dexmanone
you could try reinstalling the audio driver AFTER enabling the external drive. it's been years but had an audio prob similar and it had to do with the order of the devices firing up, or drivers being loaded. sounds like you external drive driver is trumping the sound driver.

Originally posted by: QuantumPion
Maybe but I find that unlikely as windows says the driver is working correctly and applications do try to ouput sound normally, just nothing comes out.

Maybe don't discount dexmanone's suggestion. The order in which drivers are installed can have a profound effect on what works and what doesn't, regardless of what windows says about the driver working correctly. I used to do video editing and when the video editing card was installed, a precise order of driver installations had to be followed otherwise things would not work correctly. Windows would say all day that things were fine but it lied. (Well maybe it thought things in it's own little world were fine but it did not see the whole picture.)

Before doing that though, (or after doing that and still no sound), did you check the window's sound controls or did you check your driver's sound controls? I had sound problems and the windows sound control (speaker icon by the clock) would not fix it no matter how I set it. Then going into CONTROL PANEL > SOUND MAX provided the setting I needed to get the problem fixed. Note that I said CONTROL PANEL > SOUND MAX, ...not... CONTROL PANEL > SOUND AND AUDIO DEVICES.

Best of luck,
Sky

Yes I have heard of such issues with onboard sound, but never with a PCI soundcard. Oh well, I am about to install Win7 anyway so hopefully the problem will go away.