Computer fails to detect existing hardware, even with installed drivers!

My computer crashed earlier, when I booted it back up, neither the sound or the modem were working.
I went to install their drivers, but everything I do indicates that the sound card and modem don't even exist...

The 'Add Hardware' wizard fails to automatically or manually detect the presence of a modem or sound card (nevermind the driver).
The 'Phone and Modem Options' has my modem listed, but gives the status of 'not present'.
The 'Device Manager' sees a sound driver installed (named 'unknown'), and says it's location is 'unknown'.
Trying to manually install the modem driver fails each time with "failed to detect MODEM device".
Trying to manually install the sound driver causes the computer to crash.
At this point, I think it's safe to say that my drivers aren't the problem, it's the lack of hardware detection.
Unless, there's a driver that allows the computer to see certain hardware that got corrupt, and I don't know it exists; but the USB ports still work, so I doubt that's the problem.
This is a laptop, so I can't pull, and plug them back in, like I could with a tower.
Anyone have any ideas? I need to get this fixed - soon.

Thanks in advance for any help, Yarin

Maybe try reverting to a previous restore point, or if that doesn't work, try reinstalling the Windows service pack?
You could also try deleting the sound card & modem in Device Manager, reboot and see if it detects them then.

Yet another problem I've seen is that, for some reason, Windows sometimes does this because of some value in the registry. I once had a CD-RW drive completely "disappear", tried to reinstall it several times, but to no avail. After a long search I stumbled accross a random post on the device manufacturer's forum that recommended deleting a certain registry string (the "key", by the way, was in hexadecimal - good luck spotting *that* on your own!). I backed up my registry, deleted the entry, rebooted, and drive was immediately detected. Go figure. :p

Okay, after doing some intensive searching and trial-and-error I found and did this:

According to a few places, XP SP3 doesn't come with support for HDA (High Definition Audio) devices. I have SP3. You have to tweak the registry to make Microsoft Update KB888111 think it's really running on SP2. I did that, then tried to install the Realtek audio drivers again. I get error code 10 from the device driver, with no reason for initialization failure.

Well, come to find out, the whole reason I'm suppose to do this is to get the "Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio" PCI device driver on my system. But I already have it, so much so, that when I try to remove it, it re-installs itself when I re-boot the computer. I figure that because I already had SP2 before installing SP3, the support was already there. Besides, this problem happened after I already upgraded to SP3.

According to » Download Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio, the UAA HDA bus driver, supports the "Realtek High Definition Audio" driver, which is exactly the driver that I can't get working. When I go to install the Realtek driver, I have an option to install 2 different versions. Both of which I got by downloading motherboard_driver_audio_realtek_azalia.exe, which is the program my laptop's support company's website pointed me to. The first version is from 2005, the second from early 2009. My laptop is a couple years old, so I figured it was designed to receive the 2005 version. When I try to install the 05 version, my computer crashes and re-boots instantly during the last parts of the driver installation. Once it reboots, I have a new item in my Device Manager, it's name is "Unknown" and it's location is unknown, it says it's function properly, but I think anyone can summarize that it's not doing anything. But, when I install the 09 version, the installation is successful (no crash), but the device fails to start (with error code 10), even when I re-boot.

I read that it could be a problem with my enumerator. But I do have a "Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator" driver residing in my System Devices, it's location is unknown (which was slightly suspicious at first), but it won't let me turn the device off or on. But I'm guessing that it's just a software device and in no way is dependent on hardware, and is generally inert (basically just a placeholder that allows the OS to see certain hardware).

And yes, I have tried to get the Add Hardware wizard to automatically detect the hardware. I always un-install the drivers before trying new ones. And I re-boot often in between driver installations, very often.

If there is some key holding this back somewhere, I can't find any mention of it. I also used an advanced registry editing program, to look for any keys last modified around the time of the crash too. Good idea I thought, but the only keys that it finds that has any mention of Realtek or HDA (spelled in various forms), deals with the MRUCache. So nothing.

When it comes down to it... I've reached a serious dead-end, and don't have a clue were to go from here. Anyone got any ideas?

I guess you could always go back to SP2 instead and see if everything works. :)

I don't think it'll help.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. The first time it happened, the result was identical, but I never tried this profusely to get it working again.

I just trashed that OS, and revamped my system, then put the drivers fresh on with no problem.

Confirmed...

I removed SP3. (and uninstalled the problem-related drivers, of course)
When I went to install the Realtek driver, this time, there was only one on the list (instead of those 2). It didn't have a date or version next to it's name, so I didn't know what it was. Being the only one, I tried it of course. It successfully installed, but once again, failed with error code 10. When I checked out that malfunctioning driver, I found that was the 05 version. So, uninstalling SP3 confirmed that the 05 version was indeed the correct one. But it still fails to work. (at least the system didn't crash when installing that version this time)

I am running out of options in bad way.

One other thing, maybe someone can figure it out with this too...
The whole reason the sound and modem stopped working was because I attempted to play a WMA file. Apparently, this WMA file was corrupt. Once the player reached a certain point in the file, the whole computer froze (the cursor wouldn't even move). I did a force shutdown (by holding down the power button for 8 seconds) When I turned it back on, all was okay, except for the sound and modem.

Have you confirmed that the sound & modem aren't broken? I know it's unlikely, but it's a slight possibility. Are they separate cards, or are they built into the motherboard?

At this point I'd be tempted to do a backup of your drive, then install a fresh XP into a new partition and see if it detects the sound & modem.

BTW, after you uninstalled SP3, did you reinstall SP2? There might be some files that got overwritten by another program or not completely uninstalled by SP3...

Odd... that the same problem occurred very recently with a friends computer. With a Realtek chip... same issue as you're having.

I "solved" the issue by buying a $12 sound card :-), and dubbed it a "hardware fault".

>> One other thing, maybe someone can figure it out with this too...
The whole reason the sound and modem stopped working was because I attempted to play a WMA file. Apparently, this WMA file was corrupt. Once the player reached a certain point in the file, the whole computer froze (the cursor wouldn't even move). I did a force shutdown (by holding down the power button for 8 seconds) When I turned it back on, all was okay, except for the sound and modem.

You can also try uninstalling the device itself from the hardware manager panel and reboot. I also read that this sometimes helps:

'open device manager click "system devices" disable "microsoft UAA bus driver for high definition audio" uninstall "UAA bus driver" make rescan'

I'm not sure if it'll do any good, but you could also try some Registry Cleaning software. I've used these ones:
CCleaner - Home
ToniArts EasyCleaner - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com

or as I used to tell customers when I did tech support long ago, try looking for & deleting *.tmp files on your system. Some people actually had about 50,000 .tmp files on their system and deleting them sometimes solved their problem.

>> or as I used to tell customers when I did tech support long ago, try looking for & deleting *.tmp files on your system. Some people actually had about 50,000 .tmp files on their system and deleting them sometimes solved their problem.

I don't know. File extensions don't necessarily indicate the purpose of a file - I'd be afraid of deleting something important, anyway. :)

It's a longshot, but driver issues can also be caused by leftover driver files.
You can use a program such as Driver Cleaner to get rid of the files (after you've uninstalled the devices) and reinstall them again.
I know how much pain "Code 10" issues are, but I don't have any specific advice on how to solve them, if possible. I haven't been able to solve all such errors myself.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebastiani

>> or as I used to tell customers when I did tech support long ago, try looking for & deleting *.tmp files on your system. Some people actually had about 50,000 .tmp files on their system and deleting them sometimes solved their problem.

I don't know. File extensions don't necessarily indicate the purpose of a file - I'd be afraid of deleting something important, anyway. :)

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Well someone would be pretty dumb if they used a .tmp extension to store anything permanent since it's the standard extension for temp files on Windows. If the file is still being used, it'll be locked and you won't be able to deleted it anyways.
I even go as far as deleting ~*.doc, ~*.xls ... since backup .doc & .xls files start with a ~