NEED SOUND CARD DRIVER HELP!!

I'm using an HP desktop with windows XP. I recently restored my computer, wiped the hard drive and all, and have been having problems with my sound. My sound card is Realtek HDMI audio (or something like that).

Initially, the problem was just that there was no sound at all. The first thing i tried was downloading a new driver manually, from http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...&GetDown=false. After doing so, and restarting my computer, my computer was suddenly unable to recognize the sound card (when i run => dxdiag, it says no sound card was found; whereas it had recognized the card before i downloaded this driver).

After talking to a friend, i learned that i could update drivers automatically by using the device manager. So i did that, thinking it would replace what i assumed was a bad driver i had downloaded. Instead, it just told me that it can't find a better driver than the one i have.

So then i figured that the driver had been corrupted during installation or something, so i went to add/remove programs and removed it. After doing so, i went back to device manager and it no longer had my sound card under "Sound, video and game controllers". However, there is now a "PCI Device" under "System Devices" with a yellow ! next to it. When i attempt to install it, it asks me for an installation media (which i don't have) and is unable to install it without that.

So i went back to the Realtek download page and tried downloading/installing "ATI HDMI Audio Device", thinking maybe that is a substitute for the disk that i need. When i attempt to install this, i get "No driver was supported in this driver package." I then reinstalled the original driver i downloaded, and (after restarting) tried installing the last one again, with the same results.

I am so befuddled at this point and don't want to make the problem any worse than i already have. Help?

You may want to try the HP site for the soundcard driver for your model

http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html

The sound card wasn't built in to the computer. I'm pretty sure (not 100%) it came with the video card I bought about 8 months ago (ATI Radeon 2400). I remember when i first installed the video card i had the same problem of no sound, but i can't remember how i fixed it. I sure as hell didn't do this much additional damage in the process.

Also, that link you gave me doesn't appear to offer any soundcard drivers for my product anyway. (HP desktop a1620n with windows XP)

Well without the actual model # in your first post I was takin a shot in the dark .. the more precise info the better ...

Did you disable the onboard soundcard?

Apologies. I disabled the onboard sound in BIOS, but not until I had already uninstalled the driver in add/remove programs. Perhaps if i had done that first i could have prevented all this, but now my computer can't recognize the sound card and can't install it without a CD.
Do you know what the "ATI HDMI Audio Device" download from that website is supposed to do? It doesn't appear to be a driver, as the other drivers on the list are labeled as such.

Since that site didn't want to give a decent description, I googled it, and found it is, AFAIK the newer R2.0 version driver.. I wasn't going to download it to find out if it had more info ... (perhaps a readme file)
I have also come across the older R1.62 driver downloads as well... other than that I dunno

I would presume you do not have a set of rescue disks, or a recovery partition in the HDD?

No I don't

Have you checked into system restore?

Update: I managed to roll back to the previous driver, and auto-updated it to the most recent one. So now i can once again see the "ATI HDMI Audio" in device manager, but dxdiag still reports that there is no sound card, and Sounds and Audio Devices under control panel says "No Audio Device". Anyone know where to go from here? I already have onboard sound disabled in BIOS.

BTW I just got my computer back after restoring it about a week ago. I have just reinstalled a bunch of applications and I really REALLY don't want to restore it again. I'm pretty sure this can be fixed without doing so. But I could be wrong.

When you restored and disabled your onboard sound you do know you have to uninstall those drivers or it won't work properly before you install your new sounds card. And then only then can you install the software and drivers for the new sound card for it to work. Also since we have no specs on your sound card there isn't much we can do to help. Take it out and look at the label attached to it and or the writing on the sound card and write them down and tell us what it says. That should at least tell you a make and model and the manufacture of it. Just saying it cam with the ATI Radeon 2400 doesn't give any info or help on the sound card???

Renable the onboard sound option in your BIOS.

Install the chipset drivers for your board. That should have been done first, before any of the other drivers, but at this point it does not matter.

Install the sound driver from the HP site, or the Realtek site, either should work.

The ATI driver will not work, and it is not a replacement driver for the Realtek sound driver. The ATI HDMI driver is a different audio driver and only works with a DVI to HDMI dongle attached to the back of your video card. In this case audio is only passed over the HDMI port.