no soundcards found 9.10 upgrade on Dell studio xps [Resolved]

[Ron Burns]

Ron Burns wrote:
> Hi all-
> 
> I recently upgraded my Dell studio xps laptop (which shipped with 9.04) 
> to 9.10. I now have no sound.  No soundcard is detected:
<snip>

This problem is resolved and there is NO 9.10 soundcard issue with my 
Dell XPS. A number if issues came up in trying to solve this problem 
(which may be of interest to some>)

1) I did updates and upgrades using "Update Manager" I thought I was 
being conservative by accepting the default options. After booting up 
after the upgrades (including 9.04 to 9.10), I had no sound and no sound 
cards were detected.  After a few emails, a call to Dell and a call to 
Ubuntu, NoOp finally noticed from my "uname -a" output that I was 
booting up in 9.04. I guess even though I was still in 9.04 somehow the 
sound was broken during the updates.  Another kernel update appeared, so 
I installed it and it seemed all went well. Boot up still went to 9.04.

2) Web searches showed there was some issues with 9.04 to 9.10 upgrades 
and how the selection of a confusing option for "developers menus" leads 
to the boot menus not being changed.  A suggested fix for this is to run 
grub-mkconfig which I did.  On boot up I now had a menu with the all of 
the linux upgrades listed. Looking good, but on boot up I got a "initrd 
command not found" error.

3) Web searches showed that I could solve this by editing the boot 
command line script (after typing "e" during boot up).  The fix was to 
remove the line with the search command and then at grub prompt do an 
"insmod linux" then <ctrl>-x to boot. Now I got a "no linux loaded" error.

4) At this point NoOp and I took the discussion off line and exchanged a 
large number of emails. I cannot thank him enough for all of his help. 
Using a 9.10 LiveCD bootup we probed a number my system settings and 
decided it would be (probably) be safe to try to recover grub2. 
Somewhere along the way grub was updated to grub2 but maybe not 
completely. I Used the steps detailed in
    http://linuxers.org/howto/how-recover-grub2-ubuntu-910-karmic-koala
and after doing this I finally booted up into 2.6.31-17-generic #54-Ubuntu.

While I have not exercised the system much I do have sound (as well as 
wireless connectivity and touchpad functionality.)

Again Thank You all for all the kind help and putting up so many 
tangential issues.

Best Regards,
	Ron


-- 
R. R. Burns
Physicist (Retired)
Oceanside, CA