Integrated sound device refuses to start, gives code 10 error, hardware problem?

Discussion in 'Sound Cards and Speakers' started by Lukas, Mar 27, 2009.

  1. Lukas

    Lukas Geek Trainee

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    The device this problem is affecting is a Toshiba Portege M200-S838, and the integrated sound card is a SoundMax Digital Audio device.

    The laptop gave me a scare one day when I tried to bring it out of standby and it completely refused to respond. On this occasion, I found myself faced with a single blinking orange light and no other response from any action I tried. Eventually, yanking the battery for a minute or so seemed to kick it back into responsiveness and I was able to boot my machine once again. Unfortunately, I was soon to find that something had gone quite wrong.

    Upon booting up Windows I was greeted only with a beep from the PC speakers, instead of the usual welcome sound. Deciding to check the volume controls, I found myself greeted with a warning about having no mixer installed. So I checked my soundcard drivers and found that it had a little exclamation mark and was reporting a (Code 10), this device can not start.
    I've pretty much tried everything possible on the software end of things; Unistalled and reinstalled the drivers about a dozen times, even giving the older version a go, and checked the Windows Audio service a dozen times on top of that. I've even loaded up Ubuntu briefly, which I had done before, to see if it could make the sound work. It could not. I figure if two operating systems can't make the sound work, well then something's just wrong with the hardware.

    So my question to you is, what could go wrong with the hardware to cause this? I've taken my motherboard out, checked a few of the really obvious spots for connectivity, and cannot find with my naked eye any particular component that looks fried. But the rest of the motherboard was operating just fine, only the sound was giving me problems. Windows XP recognizes the sound device, it just cannot start it, but being mostly a software guy myself I have no idea how to interpret this and figure out which piece of motherboard I need to check, poke at, or even solder if necessary. It seems my best viable alternative at this time would be a PCMCIA sound card, but those are a bit out of my budget, so I'd really like to make the integrated stuff work again.

    Thank you.
     
  2. BoBBYI986

    BoBBYI986 Geek

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    This device cannot start. (Code 10)”

    What does that mean in plain English? It means that if the device which is throwing the error has added its own custom error text to your Windows system when the device was installed, then when the device encounters an error, you will see the custom error message specific to that device. But if it doesn’t have its own custom error message, then Windows uses its own generic error message for devices, which is “This device cannot start. (Code 10)”

    Microsoft recommends that when this happens, you click “Update Driver” to update the drivers for the device. You can also start the Windows troubleshooting wizard by going to the general properties tab of the device, and clicking on “Troubleshoot”.

    Before doing this, be sure that you have the correct and most up-to-date versions of the driver(s) for that device. You can also try uninstalling and reinstalling the device, using the disk which came with it.
     

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