Front panel headphone audio stopped working

[Ditto1958]

For some reason my front panel audio jacks are not working today. I opened the case to make sure everything is plugged in the way it should be and there did not appear to be any problems there. When I plug the headphones in, normally a couple of Realtek screens pop up telling me that I have just plugged something into a jack. That not only is not happening, but I can't seem to find a Realtek icon anywhere. I opened the device manager, and it says Realtek is enabled and that the drivers are the most up to date ones.

When I plug in the phones, there is no sound coming from them and the speakers don't mute.

I'm running Windows 7 RC, and my two month old system has until now been very stable.

Any ideas?

 

[A Cheese Danish]

Try the back audio port (if there is one) and see if you get the same result.
You may need to just reinstall the drivers. See if that helps.

 

[Kursah]

I would say, uninstall and re-install drivers to see if that helps alleviate the issue. What is your system specs? I have seen an onboard go south, that was on a DFI P35 though, it had an ALC888 chip that sounded pretty decent for onboard, but it would intermittently have issues. Verify the headphones are still ok by testing in the speakers headphone jack if available or by plugging them into the green port the speakers are currently using.

Maybe restart and run a scandisk to make sure something didn't get bugged for some odd reason, it can happen even in 7. Your issue is probably fairly minor and hopefully easy to fix, keep us posted on what you find!

 

[Ditto1958]

Okay, drivers are uninstalled and re installed and now I do have Realtek back in my system tray.

Front jacks still do not work, though. Realtek does not detect when I plug the headphones in.

I wonder if something came loose or unplugged. My case is an Antec NSK6580B. It's really hard to get the front bezel off to see what's going on with the front panel stuff. USB ports work fine, though.

 

[Kursah]

What kind of system, i.e. motherboard do you have? Does that case have the AC97 and HD FP connectors on the same FP cable? If so you might try the HD FP if it's a newer MB, the AC97 can be finicky on newer realtek stuff I've found...recently had that issue with an Antec 900 and Gigabyte P35-DS3L FP connection, using the HD FP connector alleviated all issues I had and it uses Realtek.

 

[Ditto1958]

Problem solved

Well, somehow it's fixed, along with a problem I didn't even know I had. I went into the case and unplugged and re-plugged in almost everything, double checking to make sure everything looked right. In the process I found out that for some reason I had never plugged in the connector for the led light on the power button for my case. After I got everything put back together it worked. Maybe something had come loose.