It's not in a testpack now, but it will be in the release.

I have seen cases where an Nvidia reference driver failed on a dell and the actual dell driver was needed. this is rare.
It is more likey that a driver that has been tweaked for a Dell would not work on a non dell card.

can we find the reference driver from the chipset manufacturer ?

if you have a machine that has special needs then make a special disk for it - but generaly not good for the masses.

a reference driver will also support a larger HWID and re-manufactuer base

so i would check IDT (formerly sigmatel) or realtek

strange that it says it is a cmajor audio (sigmatel) when the Dell technical specs say it should be an AC97 (Realtek)

There are a lot of dell PCs out there so we are bound to have  Some  dell drivers in the packs - no problem.
Lets just attempt to find reference drivers when we can...

(larger lists of supported HWIDS and less likely to have issues)

I did as you said (replaced the drivers at D/S/S/D/2 by the Dell drivers that I linked to), repacked my drivers and everything works fine.
It choosed me the right driver and sound is working automatically again. Thanks !

I think as you that the Dell driver I linked is the new version for the one that was in D/S/S/D/2 and it doesn't look like we have to touch D/S/S/C.

I'm not sure how to make sure it doesn't break anything for someone else but it looks like safe to upgrade it by the one I linked to ?

What do you guys think ?

Thanks for your research.
However, I thought that if we change an INF, we broke the digital signature, or am I missing something or is there a method to prevent this from happening ?

Thanks.

Here is what I found looks like we still have a hwid dup with two inf files, What I think needs to be done to fix this is to update the drivers with what Vorenus has provide a link to.

1) The drivers Vorenus provided a link to need to replace the drivers in D/S/S/D/2 (These are the same drivers Vorenus linked to just older) Once this is done the driver version will be at 5.10.00.4255

2) We need to remove the hwid from this inf because it is a dup of the one above it would explain why it was the selected driver as it is newer but not for this hwid. D/S/S/C/stac97.inf (Remove hwid from this inf)

Seeing how I am still learning we might be able to just replace the drivers with the newer ones and they would be select because they are newer but I think we want to eliminate the dups right Jaak?

I can do this if Jaak does not have time a Vorenus would like to test it.

Thanks,
dolivas

Thanks for your answer.

I've compared the two INFs (the one from Dell that is working and the one that is found by Windows on the pack)

It seems that the one provided by Dell is a newer version :
DriverVer=03/11/2005, 5.10.00.4255 (vs DriverVer=11/11/2004, 5.10.4251.0)

However, the one from Dell doesn't seem to support as many HWIDs than the current one and seems to lacks supports for the VIA, ALI ones etc...
I wonder where the one from the INF came from to support so many devices.

Anyway, I'll try to do as you say tomorrow and come back with the results, but I am concerned by dropping these drivers as well as I would have liked my CD to be as universal as possible. Someday I may encounter these devices the new driver dropped if I simply overwrite it.

The best solution would probably be to get our hands on the new driver version that is also containing the other devices, I guess?

That said, I'm very new to these driver packs and I'm not really sure what is possible with them or not, so I'm sure you'll have a better solution or suggestion.

Thanks.

I think the M70 will have a lot of duplicated HWIDs if we add it, and that could make it still take the wrong driver.
I suggest you replace the folder with content of your driver, and repack the sound_B pack..

I have downloaded the latest version of Sound A and B driverpacks.
When I install Windows on a Precision M70, it seems to be picking the wrong driver.

HWID : PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_266E&SUBSYS_01871028&REV_03\3&61AAA01&0&F2

Windows has choosen this INF from the driverpack : "D\S\S\C\stac97.inf"

Device manager says the card is installed and it indeed says Sigmatel C-Major Audio but there is no sound.

However, if I install the driver from Dell found on the link below, I can hear sound again.
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/ … ile=128550

Is this a known issue ? Is Windows detecting the bad driver because of a HWID conflict or is the driver simply missing ?

Thanks in advance for your help.