As you said that on the installation it works fine I presume you use the OSS modules that come packaged in the kernel and not the ALSA modules? first of all I would switch over to ALSA as soon as possible which can be found at
www.alsa-project.org
as for the OSS modules, you should try running aumix as most machine have their output set to 0 by default, if aumix won't work you can have a try at gmixer(it's for X) or wmixer just mixer and there are shitloads of other mixers which are distro specific.
if it's not your mixer settings, you can have a look by typing dmesg | more and have a look for your soundcard here (this command shows the messages during the bootprocess) and this should probably show you an error message if it's not detected / configured properly.
Kind regards,
Nils