Solved Win11 21H2 on Legacy BIOS: Audio constantly requires un-muting

Hi all,

Curious case, and I'm trying to understand the cause behind it:
Installed Win11 21H2 on my 10yo Lenovo Thinkpad E420 (support Win10 great). So far, WiFi driver is crashing but that's another thing.

When I boot the system, I get no audio. Driver is "Conexant 20671 SmartAudio HD" which is installed properly and audio is not muted, also levels are moving in the mixer while sound is playing. Increasing volume has no effect. Audio must be manually incresed with the keyboard combo Fn+F3, then audio will start to work again, that is until the next reboot.

I figured that it's possible to mute and un-mute the BIOS beeps using Fn+F1 (Mute) while in the BIOS. Additionnally, the problem can also be resolved by pressing Fn+F3 key at the Windows Boot Manager screen (BOOTMGR) even before the system actually launches. Then, we'll get to hear the Windows 11 boot sound. That is, until the next reboot, until we manually press the Fn+F3 key again.

I'm confused as I don't think I've experienced this before - Is this something others can reproduce too?
Trying to understand, as I don't think it's fixable (Another workaround would be to emulate Fn+F3 keypress on boot, but I don't think Fn key can be reproduced via batch file?).

Explained differently: When un-mutting via Fn-F3, sound return but it's as if Windows 11 is not able to send the request to the BIOS to unmute globally as well, as the BIOS beeps remain muted after the reboot too (Reminder, they can be re-enabled with Fn-F3 in the BIOS too, just no visual cue). And since Win11 doesn't support Legacy BIOS officially... I mean, could be something like that, I have a Hackintosh too on a different partition with no audio configured yet as well...

Is this a Legacy BIOS > Win11 incompatibility? No big deal but I thought it was curious?

EDIT: Tried a clean install again, no driver whatsever - I get the same behavior, I need Fn+F3 to be pressed at least once every boot for sound.

Thanks

Several other users have reported this same issue on this forum. There are about 1200 complaints on the feedback hub about it and many more across the web. According to a Microsoft Engineer, the issue has been fixed in the latest Dev ring build. So hang tight, a fix should be released to the masses soon.

glasskuter said:

Several other users have reported this same issue on this forum. There are about 1200 complaints on the feedback hub about it and many more across the web. According to a Microsoft Engineer, the issue has been fixed in the latest Dev ring build. So hang tight, a fix should be released to the masses soon.

Click to expand...

Ah wow - Sorry about this. I didn't knew what to look for, since the sound driver was actually working fine, only I needed to manually press a key on every boot. I'll look into it a bit more and also wait for the upcoming MS fix (it's a old laptop anyway, I have my primary triple-boot desktop as well).

Will mark as solved for now. Thank you! :)

glasskuter said:

hang tight, a fix should be released to the masses soon.

Click to expand...

I get this occasionally, even on a fully supported PC. Sometimes when I resume from hibernation the speaker icon has a X on it. Looking forward to that fix....

I'm getting it too since the latest round of updates. I didn't notice it after upgrading to W11, it seemed to happen a few weeks later.

Update! I watched to see what would happen at start-up today but my audio worked fine. I could hear the start-up sound normally and the audio device did not have an 'X' on it denoting it had been muted. This is different to what happened the last few days and yet I'm not seeing any newly installed updates which might have fixed this. Maybe it's an intermittent issue?

Slinky said:

Maybe it's an intermittent issue?

Click to expand...

The only reason I knew this is I sometimes have this problem myself and had already researched it. So I'm waiting along with everyone else for a fix. For some, the problem is intermittant and for others it's all the time. For most people it seemed to happen after a computer comes out of sleep.