I recently lost sound on my IBM Thinkpad T42. Not sure why as I made no updates to the system. The alsamixer shows nothing muted and the sound levels at 80% or greater.

I am using Mint 8 and /proc/version shows "Linux version 2.6.31-23-generic (buildd@palmer) (gcc version 4.4.1 (Ubuntu 4.4.1-4ubuntu9) ) #75-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 18 18:08:39 UTC 2011" The module is reported as 'snd-intel8x0' but in /etc/modules the only line is 'lp' ??

Running lpci gives the following for the audio:

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
Subsystem: IBM Device 0554
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
I/O ports at 1c00 [size=256]
I/O ports at 18c0 [size=64]
Memory at c0000c00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
Memory at c0000800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: Intel ICH
Kernel modules: snd-intel8x0

I would really like to get the audio back. Anyone have any suggestions for what to try? ( Oh, and how does pulsaudio come into this? )

Have you tried turning it up with the volume buttons above the keyboard? Those Thinkpads have real hardware mixers inside of them, it is separate from Alsa or PulseAudio.

That was it. Took a lot of hits on the button to get it up high enough which is why I didn't find it earlier. Thank you.