Soundblaster Z not recognized in Windows 8.1

I've had a periodic problem over the last few months with my Sound blaster Z card not being recognized by the OS and subsequently no sound. I've been searching the forums for a fix. No success so far. Tried reinstalling drivers, 5 min power down unplugged, extend post time to 10s. Nothing has helped so far.

I'm not that attached to the card so I thought I'd use the onboard sound. I have an Asus MB (not sure about the exact model). How do you get it to work? I did enable Azalia sound in BIOS, but I don't get any sound. Do I need additional drivers, if so what would those be?

Realtek is not there. I also have a yellow exclamation point on high definition audio controller. I saw on on forum that a guy claimed there was a bug at hardware id
"PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0012&SUBSYS_00231102" I have no idea what to do about that though.

I did try to reseat the soundcard (what a pain). It still didn't recognize it on reboot.

I'll continue tomorrow. If you have time could you be very specific in any advice you wish to share. Pretend I'm an idiot (not far from truth). To start what info do you need to determine the exact audio driver I need. I did go to the Realtek site and DL and tried to install. (0009-64bit_Win7_Win8_Win81_Win10_R282}

It errors out on the last step with a "Install Reaktek HD Audio Driver Failure !! [error code: 0x0000000D]" If this helps any.

I'm a little more clear headed this morning.  I checked control panel and I have a Sabertooth X79. It has a error for the High definition audio controller, Manufacturer microsoft. Locatation: PCI bus 3, device 0, function 0, Reinstall the drivers for this device (code 18). I don't know what specific device this refers to.

I will go to the Asus and DL audio. That was a good idea. I was searching the realtek site. I wish there was a way to fix SB-Z. The card is fine. I'll get back after work. Thx

A faster way to clear the mobo of lingering gremlins, and I meant to mention it, is to unplug the rig and hold in the Power On button on the front panel for several seconds.  That usually works.

SB should work unless its defective, which could be.   You could go to Device manager and uninstall all the High Def audio drivers and then install the SB driver you saved to desktop.   Might work.

Good luck and let us know. 

Another thing to try to get the SB working is to remove the card, use an uninstaller program or add/remove in Windows or CCleaner to completely remove any mention of Sound Blaster/Creative .  Could be new driver install not working with old files.  Then plug the card in and install the latest SB drivers.   Worth a shot. 

The frustration level is rising. The reason I spend so much on a computer is to avoid problems like this. I have a 5k computer with no sound.  I've given up on the idea of getting the sound blaster Z to be recognized in windows so I'm focused on just getting the onboard sound from my Sabertooth X79 to work. I can't even get this to work. I have completely removed the SB-Z card, enabled onboard sound in bios, but I'm running into the same issue as I did with the card. The card is recognized in the device, but incorrectly. Instead of Sound Blaster .....it just says pci device. It seems like this would be an easy fix, just point it to where the drivers are located. Here's the problem. The drivers are part of an exe and it will not completely run unless the device is named properly. I can't get the card to be properly recognized without the drivers and I can't install the drivers unless the proper naming of the card. What a damned frustrating situation.

I'm now trying to get the onboard sound to work but I'm running into the same issue. The realtek sound is being called "audio device on high definition audio bus" with a yellow ! preceding it. I tried to install the sound drivers I got from the Asus site, but it's giving me a "Install Realtek HD audio driver failure !! error code
0x0000000D". Now Monday evening everything was running perfect and nothing was installed to PC. Yesterday I booted up to this issue and it's persisted until now. I'm very open to suggestions.ty

No system restore. I read not to enable this with SSD. I went to install latest Nvidia drivers and even this crashed. I'm slow but at this point I started to see a pattern. Long story short, I when to msconfig and selected normal start up, load all stuff and this corrected the problem. I must have installed a tune up program at some point and it decided to become a problem yesterday. Thanks for your help.In a way it was a good thing because I discovered my incremental back ups weren't being saved properly. Thx for your time.

Did you ever manage to find a solution to your problem? I know the headache that comes along with driver and hardware configuration at times. Sometimes it can be simple and you run into no issues, and sometimes you run into problems that it seems like they're will never be and ending in sight.