T440 Win8 "no audio devices installed"

[user17600]

All, hoping someone has a solution to my "no audio devices installed" problem, in "playback devices" and therefore have no ability to hear anything from my laptop.

The machine in question is a T440, running Win8 (not 8.1). It is a corporate machine for which I have local admin rights. I work remotely so replacing the machine is a difficult proposition.

I use a softphone and early in the week all was working well. I went to join a conference on Tuesday and couldn't get sound from anything but the internal speakers. I went about my business until I could reboot (figured it was a temp glitch) but after that there was no sound at all.

I de-installed and re-installed the Realtek driver software, twice - both the Lenovo version and the Realtek site version, to no avail. I cold rebooted in between (including shut down the internal battery and pulling the removable battery), no joy.

The interesting thing is that each of the devices show in the device manager in control panel - the realtek device, the USB headset and USB speakerphone.

When I click the speaker icon, rather than getting a pop-up with a volume slider, I get a two-column wide black box with a blue boundary.

The corporate helpdesk is at a loss, as am I. I can't imagine what has happened that reinstalling the software and drivers didn't fix, and don't understand why devices show in device manager but not in playback (or recording) devices.

The internet suggests the reinstall of the Realtek software should have sorted this out, but clearly it has not.

I'm open to any other suggestions (short of reinstalling the OS, since the helpless desk will need to do that). Many thanks for any insight and let me know if I left any details out.

Cheers,

U1

[user17600]

Well, the 100+ views without a response confirms what the corporate helpdesk ended up concluding: an OS reinstall was the only thing to fix the issue. I did have then run a live-cd before embarking on a reinstall, and the live-cd showed the hardware was working.

No idea what caused it, but the situation is now resolved.