Unknown PCI multimedia audio device

[Mamapajama]

I just put together an old system to use as a second system in my house.. I stuck in an old sound card i used to use sometime ago, and all the drivers have been loaded properly. But I can't hear anything still.. I know my comp's trying to play sounds, but nothing's coming out of my speakers.. it's not the speakers because they work on my other new system. But anyway, here's the point; when I go to device manager, under sounds etc.. my sound card is there and all the appropriate device listings.. under "unkown devices," "PCI multimedia audio device" is constantly there with missing drivers. No matter what drivers I get online or look for in my win98 CD, there is not appropriate driver. How can I solve this problem? I can't even find out what files its looking for, so i'm not even sure exactly WHAT it's looking for.. any help please? Thanks!

 

[LukFilm]

Click on that Unknown thing, hit Reinstall Drivers and point it to the directory where the drivers are. That might help.

 

[Mamapajama]

Well, the problem is, I don't know what drivers I need to look for.. thats why i tried to point the driver directory to many different places, but none of them have what i need.. I guess i need to find out what the heck this thing is first?

 

[billandopus]

First off you need to id your multimedia card and go to that maker's site to check for the appropriate and latest drivers.

Or you can try to reinstall the drivers and when you have the chance to do so - list the hardware and the associated drivers on your system that are available. It could be possible that the old drivers that were installed and "working" previously are either not accessible or filed away on another "system cdrom" if your system was a branded one like an IBM or a Compaq etc.

I have a friend of whom I upgraded her system to win98(!) and her previous installed sound card drivers wouldn't work. She had a prepackaged IBM system that was 4-5 years old. Needless to say I had to call IBM support and then surfed the IBM site to find some super obscured drivers, downloaded them and it finally worked. That's the problem with branded stuff sometimes. Very proprietary.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

 

[MrWhiteUK]

Sounds like an onboard sound chip needs to be disabled, check the manual.

 

[Jiggz]

MrWhiteUK might have the right answer to this trivia. Check the manual and see if there is an onboard sound on the mobo. If there's none, delete all occurrence of your sound card from the Device Manager and then manually install it. If it still does not work, try letting us know what sound card and mobo we're talking about and we'll get back to you.

 

[Mamapajama]

Thanks guys.. well, the thing is, I'd like to try keeping the onboard sound system instead of using my other sound card now.. I'm using a Chaintech mobo, CT-7ata to be exact and an Athlon 600 Slot A. I went to the chaintech site to download the sound drivers, but apparently theyre not it.. my manual says that the onboard sound chip is Cmedia 8378, but windows says the drivers are not there. I checked driverguide.com, but they didn't have the appropriate drivers either. By the way, I DID check for jumpers for onboard disable/enable, but the problem is that there ARE none . I tried to do this instead in the bios, and i'm hoping that DID work when I needed it to. I had no problem with the sound using my monster mx400.. but yeah.. right now I'm just interested in trying to get back to using the onboard sound.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

If I were you I wre try the drivers for the onboard audio that are found here. I know it is a PCChips webpage, but they used to put that same cmedia chip on some of their boards and there is a link there under audio for a cmedia driver. Good luck!