Dual booting XP & 7 - XP No sound

Alright, so I know this an XP issue. But what I've noticed with build 7000 and now 7068, is that when I load up my computer and boot Windows 7 the sound works fine in 7. However when I go back to XP after having been in 7 ocassionally the sound is gone. I have a volume icon in my system tray and I can adjust the levels but no sound.

The only fix I have found for this was uninstalling my audio driver in XP and rebooting my PC and having XP find and install the driver itself. But even then sometimes it doesn't work and I have to do countless reboots before I could get the sound working again.

Anyone else experiencing this?

I finally freed up a second HDD and installed the final release candidate of Windows 7 last night. Install went without a hitch, despite my low scoring hardware (onboard video gets a rating of 2.0!).

Tonight, I go back to XP Pro (with SP3 and all maintenance up to date) for my regular video chat via Windows Live Messenger. Surprise - no sound at my end of the conversation. The other party can see and hear me as normal. So I check my sound systems with speakers, headphones, etc - NO SOUND anywhere.

Then I boot back to Windows 7 and there is beautiful sound everywhere.

How does Windows 7 mess up the sound on Windows XP. They're on separate HDDs, not sharing virtual systems or anything.

I need the sound for my daily video chat sessions (in XP). There must be a fix for this, right?

weird....if its a true dual-boot one OS should have no effect on the other.

I dual-boot xp and win7 and have no issues. I have a 125gig harddrive that I split into two 59gig partitions. When I boot into either xp or win7 I can see the other partition and even open the drive and grab files/folders if i wanted.


but again drivers are not shared when dual-booting.....I think your issue has to do with drivers or hardware issue that just happened to have an issue. I do not think win7 had anything to do with it breaking.

andythecurefan said:

The only fix I have found for this was uninstalling my audio driver in XP and rebooting my PC and having XP find and install the driver itself. But even then sometimes it doesn't work and I have to do countless reboots before I could get the sound working again.

Andy.....and Roy

After you uninstall the audio drivers if you click the "scan for hardware changes" at the top of the device manager XP should find and reinstall the audio drivers. You won't have to reboot XP.

Just figured it would save you a few min of wasted time. :)

Update - just to add to the confusion.
Last night, I deleted the audio drivers and tried the scan for new hardware. It reinstalled the drivers. Still no sound. Rebooted XP - still quiet. Powered down and watched the F1 race from Japan then went to bed. This morning, I power it up -to XP, and there is sound again.

Don't know who the magic genie is who sneaked in overnight and fixed everything but I'll definitely keep very detailed notes as I switch in the future. I need to be able to count on the sound being there.

PS - I'm not new to booting multiple systems. Usually I use GAG to select between 3 Windows, 2 Kubuntu and a recovery system. For this Windows 7 testing, I've simplified it to just the two Windows images and no GAG. But if I have too much trouble switching transparently, I'll need to build another test machine just for Windows 7. (not my first choice obviously)

I installed Windows 7 to a separate hard drive with XP already on the first drive. My sound worked in XP before installing Win7 but no sound after installing 7. I uninstalled my sound drivers several times then reinstalled them but that didn't work. In Device Manager there is an exclamation mark sign next to my sound device. This problem occurs with my soundblaster audigy es and the realtek onboard sound. When I try to let windows update it it says that it can't find my device. The driver software from Asus says no device found. I booted Windows 7 and the sound works fine. I then uninstalled the drivers in W7 and reinstalled them but that didn't work. I install the Windows 7 drivers in Windows 7 and the WinXP drivers in Win XP. I have shut down and rebooted the PC several times with no change.