Need help in re-installing Windows XP audio sub-system

[Guest]

Background: A little while ago, the audio on my Windows XP Pro SP2 system
stopped working. I was using the on-board audio card and never had a problem
before. Then, the audio device just wasn't recognized by windows anymore.
When I went to the "Sounds and Audio Devices Properties" window from the
Control Panel, it would tell me that no audio device was detected. Looking
in the Device Manager, however, under the "Sound, Video and Game Controllers"
section, all drivers were installed properly, with no IRQ conflicts, and no
yellow exclamation points on any of the sound devices or codecs. I also
verified that my speakers were working on another system, obviously, and
ensured that the audio card was enabled in my motherboard's BIOS. I
downloaded the latest drivers for my motherboard (and on-board audio card),
uninstalled and successfully re-installed those drivers multiple times.
Still no sound! I even went out and bought a new PCI audio card, installed
it, downloaded and installed the latest drivers for it. STILL no luck. This
is when I really began to scratch my head.

Next, I tried a to do a non-destructive "Repair" of Windows using that
option from the Windows XP setup CD. I got errors doing that , and I gave up
after several attempts. Finally, on a cloned backup hard drive, I
re-installed Windows completely. Lo and behold, the audio worked fine!

This leads me to believe that some part of the Windows XP audio "sub-system"
on my old hard drive is corrupt or has corrupted files. Does that make sense?

So that I don't have to start from scratch with a fresh XP installation and
re-install all my apps, I would like to be able to just re-install the audio
sub-system of Windows XP on my old hard drive. Is this possible?

Is there just a list of DLLs that I can extract from the Windows XP setup CD
and overwrite? If so, what is that list? What services will I need to stop
in order to do this? Will I need to re-register any DLLs?

Help in this matter would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

[DL]

Its not possible that your hd has bad sectors?
Why did the repair install fail, with what errors?

 

[Guest]

I'm pretty sure that there are no bad sectors. I've run a chkdsk.

I can't remember the exact error when I ran the XP repair installation
because it wasn't useful. It was something to effect that there were errors
with the installation and the repair couldn't continue. Yay.

 

[Guest]

I was wrong. The error I mentioned was for my cloned disk.

The problem I was having running the XP repair installation on my original
disk was that the Windows file system wasn't even recognized. I'm assuming
this is because of the size of my parition, which is 200GB (larger than the
137GB max readable by the original XP disc). How can I get around this
problem?

 

[Frank]

I was wrong. The error I mentioned was for my cloned disk.

The problem I was having running the XP repair installation on my
original
disk was that the Windows file system wasn't even recognized. I'm
assuming
this is because of the size of my parition, which is 200GB (larger
than the
137GB max readable by the original XP disc). How can I get around
this
problem?

Slipstream your XP to the latest SP package.
<http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/AutoPatcher-XP.shtml>
<http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562>

 

[DL]

By creating a slipstreamed installation cd containing the latest SP.
I've used Autostreamer
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562
but there are others

 

[Guest]

Well, I did finally manage to get my sound working again. I used the Windows
XP Repair Installation tool, but I ran into some problems with it:

I first cloned my disk and then tried the XP repair installation on the
cloned drive. I think there were some errors or indexes on the drive that
were out of whack that prevented the XP setup from properly recognizing the
XP installation on the drive. That's what threw me off to begin with.

Later, I tried the XP Repair Installation on my original drive, and
similarly the setup couldn't detect the XP installation. The problem this
time, however, was that my disk is formatted with a single 200GB partition.
My Windows XP setup CD is one of the old ones that didn't recognize drives
larger than 137GB.

Anyway, long story short, my sound now works! The repair installation
somehow knocked out my wireless adapter, which I had to re-install, but aside
from that, everything else seems to look good. And best of all, my sound now
works! Hooray!

For anyone curious, this is link I used for help in using the XP repair
installtion tool:
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897