Switching Sound Cards. . .
 

Hi guys im just wondering what, how and where I would start to change my soundcard. I am going to be switching from my onboard sound to a sound blaster card. What do I do?

Number 1: Check BIOS for disableing onboard sound. Most have that.
Number 2: Install SB card.
Number 3: boot to root and run alsaconf, if installed.
3a: pick sound
3b: alsamixer and unmute sound levels
3c: alsactl store to write asound
ctrl-d to logout
log in as your favorite user and enjoy the music.
PS: 'member to plug speakers in at some point in the above list. :)

I get this error no PnP or PCI devices found. This happens after it searches for sound cards. Then It asks me if I want to probe legacy sounds cards, and I still get nothing! I alsa tryed compiling an alsa ens1371 driver last night and then the modules would'nt insert into the kernel. . . What do I do!!?!?!?

Does it say no PCI or PnP cards installed in alsaconf?

You may need to enable hotplug.

Well hotplug starts during boot, so does that mean its enabled? By the way my sound card is a Sound Blaster 16 PCI. . .

I think there may be several problems

1) I think you may have picked the wrong driver. The ens1371 driver is for some soundblaster cards.
Alsa drivers
You can verify the correct driver by running lspci as root.

2) alsaconf writes to /etc/modules.conf to load the sound modules. I would delete the old lines
pertaining to alsa in modules.conf and then run alsaconf.

3) Are you running the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel? If you are running a stock 2.4 kernel and have the alsa driver
package installed you should only have to run alsaconf after disabling the onboard sound in the bios
as described by Nichole_knc. Do you have both the alsa-driver tgz and the alsa-driver compiled
from source. If you do you will need to go with one or the other.

Yeah I teyed lspci but no sound card shows on the list so I tryed plugging it in different pci slots and rebooting a few times still nothing, but now I have another problem when I try to go back to old configuration after I enabled the onboard audio in the bios I get errors. For some reason when it boots up and when I run alsaconf it is unable to insert the modules into the kernel, so now what? I think I am doing everything right.. . .

Help will be apprecciated!

I think I will try and recompile the kernel to 2.6.7 so I will let you guys know if I succeed or not.