Hello,

I have a Dell Latitude 6400 laptop. No matter what I try, the internal micro does not work. I have tried with various Linux distros (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora), read a lot of postings, tried nearly everything with alsamixer and pavucontrol and so on... I just cannot record anything, be it with Skype, Audacious, or even the command line tool arecord.

The BIOS of my laptop has an option for a hardware self-test diagnostics. When I run this test, I see under "Cables: hardware detect test": "Microphone board option detected: no". The internal micro is enabled in the BIOS.

Does this mean that the micro is broken?

The audio device is an Intel 82801I HD audio controller.

What can I do to test it? to get it to work?

Thank you in advance.

That sounds like it either has no internal mic or it has been disconnected.
You could check that the soundcard driver is working with recording by plugging in a headset/microphone to the mic socket if it has one.
If an external mic connected to the mic socket works but the internal one doesn't then the only thing to do is open it up and check the mic is connected internally.

Yes, an external microphone (from a headset) works perfectly!

It looks like the dell hardware test wasn't lying then. The only way to fix that would be to take the laptop apart and reconnect or replace the faulty hardware.

Thank you for your quick and definite answer. But taking a laptop apart is far beyond my capabilities...

Maybe I should learn to live with an external micro, unless I find a video on YouTube explaining me how to screw apart a Dell Latitude 6400...

If the microphone is the only problem I would just stick with the external mic Taking the laptop apart just to get to the microphone is probably even more work than you would guess. If you are interested it checking it out though Dell usually has service manuals available with step by step instructions. If your laptop is the E6400 this might be the right one for you:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/...-e6400/manuals

Page 41 of the English PDF shows how to get the microphone out, and the steps you need to do before getting to the microphone.

Thank you. That is hard stuff to read and try, at least for me. Bit I will give it a try. I will let you know then...

Thnak you 1000 times again,
D.

PS: I also suspect the internal micro to be broken.