I have a Dell Inspiron 15 7537.

I had installed 14.04 on it, and had no problems with the sound initially. However, like my with ethernet card, it seemed expecting to not have driver/software issues in linux was unrealistic.

I purchased an SSD for the laptop and installed Ubuntu 14.04 on that. Then, I used gparted to copy over the windows partition from the disk that came with the laptop.

Everything still worked just fine, until I booted into Windows 8.1. The sound worked fine while I was in Windows, but after rebooting the laptop, and going back into Ubuntu, the sound stopped working through the internal laptop speakers.

I noticed however, that I was still able to use my headphones to receive sound while in Ubuntu.

From here on, I could boot into Windows 8.1 to receive sound through the internal speakers, but I could no longer get the sound to work again in Ubuntu 14.04 unless using headphones.

I decided to experiment, so I completely wiped the disk, and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04. The sound was back! I then again proceeded to copy over my windows partition. Again, after booting into Windows 8.1, and then coming back to Ubuntu, my internal speakers would no longer produce sound.

I have tried the most common solutions like:

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio unity-control-center sudo alsa force-reload

or

pulseaudio -k

I have also tried making sure that nothing was muted in alsamixer. I have also tried installing the pulse audio volume control tool. If I have a song playing, I can see the audio levels moving for the internal speakers, as if it should be playing.

The pulse audio volume control tool also shows my HDMI card was a sound device, but it recognizes it as off.

It may be worth noting that in alsamixer, the application seems to recognize my PCH/output card as the secondary card, and the HDMI as the first. However, this has always been the case, so I am not sure that is the problem.

I don't know a lot about how this is all engineered, but in my understanding I am having a hard time gathering how booting into another OS could stop the speakers from working in another.

What can I do to restore sound to my system, and determine why booting into windows causes this behaviour? I would very much like to use a dual boot system.

lspci -v output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT DRAM Controller (rev 09) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Capabilities: <access denied> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Dell Device 05fa Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 60 Memory at e3000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M] Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] I/O ports at 5000 [size=64] Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: i915 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 09) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 63 Memory at e3610000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP USB xHCI HC (rev 04) (prog-if 30 [XHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 56 Memory at e3600000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HECI #0 (rev 04) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 61 Memory at e3619000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: mei_me 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller (rev 04) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 62 Memory at e3614000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev e4) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=0 Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: pcieport 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev e4) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=02, sec-latency=0 Memory behind bridge: e3500000-e35fffff Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: pcieport 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev e4) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Bus: primary=00, secondary=03, subordinate=03, sec-latency=0 I/O behind bridge: 00004000-00004fff Memory behind bridge: e3400000-e34fffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000bfb00000-00000000bfbfffff Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: pcieport 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev e4) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0 Bus: primary=00, secondary=04, subordinate=04, sec-latency=0 I/O behind bridge: 00003000-00003fff Memory behind bridge: e2000000-e2ffffff Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 00000000d0000000-00000000e1ffffff Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: pcieport 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP USB EHCI #1 (rev 04) (prog-if 20 [EHCI]) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 23 Memory at e361d000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: ehci-pci 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 04) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0 Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: lpc_ich 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 04) (prog-if 01 [AHCI 1.0]) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 59 I/O ports at 5088 [size=8] I/O ports at 5094 [size=4] I/O ports at 5080 [size=8] I/O ports at 5090 [size=4] I/O ports at 5060 [size=32] Memory at e361c000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: ahci 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP SMBus Controller (rev 04) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 255 Memory at e3618000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256] I/O ports at efa0 [size=32] 02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 73) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-N 7260 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 64 Memory at e3500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi 03:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 5287 (rev 01) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 57 Memory at e3405000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Expansion ROM at bfb00000 [disabled] [size=64K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: rtsx_pci 03:00.1 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12) Subsystem: Dell Device 05f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 58 I/O ports at 4000 [size=256] Memory at e3404000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K] Memory at e3400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: r8168 04:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 750M] (rev ff) (prog-if ff) !!! Unknown header type 7f

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf contents: