onboard, sound help (drivers maybe?)

My dad had been messing with partition magic, and that particular app wasn't used correctly ( lets just leave it at that) so we had to reinstall windows, and we didnt reformat, all the files are still here, plus or minus a few things, anyway the sound does NOT work, ive tryed a variety of things

heres the strange part though. if i use the realtek audio driver settings that came with the motherboard drivers and work with the 5.1 altec lansing speakers, the TEST works fine (the environmental sound and plain test come out just fine, i can hear it) but when it comes to say, media player, or a game. nothing

its as if windows cant find the sound drivers, or cannot see it... but the test works fine... any ideas?

i tried doing a dxdiag, and it gave me this, NO options to edit sound settings, instead i get this

No sound card was found. If one is expected, you should install a sound driver provided by the hardware manufacturer.

Did you just install windows on top of itself then ?
If this is the case, backup everything and do it properly. A clean install that is :)
Even if you fix this, windows will make a mess of itself. Heck, this is a weird problem on its own (dxdiag saying no card, but you can get output via the test program ? - All sound should be going through 'Direct Sound' which is part of DirectX).

We can try and narrow it down if you really want to go down this route, but talking from experience, you'll get nothing but issues im afraid :(

no, i didnt reinstall windows on top of its self, but yes its very strange that its not working but the test is

take me through the route that might fix it! lol

i would do a proper reinstall, it is really the best route to go...