So this problem has got me perplexed. I think it may be a problem with the BIOS but I honestly have no idea. So here is the situation. I have 3 partitions on my Hard drive. One for XP, first partition. One for Linux, and one for swap.

I had been booting Ubuntu from a portable HD for quite a while and had no sound issues. I decided to partition the disk on my laptop when Ubuntu feisty was released as my wireless card finally worked easily in that release. I had no problem with sound from the portable HD.

After installing Ubuntu onto my HD the first time there was no problem with the sound. Then after going back into XP and then back into Ubuntu is when the sound no longer worked.

I thought it was a bug in Feisty but then I tried Edgy and got the same thing and now I have just installed Fedora 7...and get the same thing.

I think I have tried shutting down the computer completely before booting into linux and yet it still didn't help.

I have installed each of these distros several times. And it seems to work ok at first if the previous booted system was linux during the installation. Then as soon as I go into XP and back to linux it fails again and can't get it back.

I have an HP dv2025nr laptop
AMD Turion X2 1.6 GHz
1G Ram
broadcom 4311 wireless
Conexant HD audio card

The sound module that is usually used and works for a while is snd-hda-intel

More debugging stuff can be seen here:
sound card stuff --
http://pastebin.ca/508727
http://pastebin.ca/508728

I've seen that before. WinXp changes the sound card settings, which can keep it from working in linux without a cold boot.

The bios setting that might help is one that says,
Plug n, Play OS installed, yes or no. If you set it to no, the Bios will set up the interrupts. That's what you need it to do i think.

Hmm...I will poke around my BIOS but if there is one thing I hate about my laptop is that HP made it so ridiculously simple, I can hardly change anything...I have also noticed with Grub (I think GRUB since it shows in both ubuntu and fedora) That as soon as it boots the first thing that flashes on the screen is "Found BIOS bug #87[0000..some number]"

I wonder if I should revert my BIOS to an earlier revision...

I've had trouble with sound too, lately. My sound module takes 2 minutes to load with recent kernels. It's a ymfpci 724 i think.
If linux prints out that it found a bug, it probably has a fix for it there, and applies it.

welp, so far I have looked around the BIOS, nothing helps out...amazingly just a couple days ago HP released a new version of the BIOS...but it didn't help out. So I tried keeping the default ntldr as my boot loader, seeing if it helped not installing grub to the MBR...it doesn't. I also just had grub installed to its own partition.

I also have tried editing the grub boot command for the kernel and added pnpbios=off and acpi=off. Still didn't help.

So I emailed HP asking them to look in to it...I am certain it has to be a BIOS problem but there is NOTHING these HP bios allow me to do about it...I think I can change the system time and date...run a hard drive check...change the boot order and thats about it!

We will see what HP has to say about it.