Sound Blaster Audigy stopped working

[HardDriv'n]

Hi.

I need to know if this card is kaput. It was a brand new order from Amazon.com, bought from Amazon itself as a Creative partner.

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE (OB PN 06SB057000001 Rev C)

I plugged it into a PCI slot on the motherboard, booted into Windows XP x64, installed the software from the disc, rebooted, and the sound was working. Now I only played around in the OS for about half an hour (recently purchased OS), and rebooted into a Linux live disc to create some extra partitions for data. After rebooting into Windows, the card no longer seemed to be outputting sound. The programs I ran didn't output any audio errors, but there wasn't any sound I could hear. The Device Manager didn't show any errors either.

After troubleshooting my (unchanged) speaker setup, I decided to uninstall the drivers, removed the device from the DM, powered down, removed the PCI card, and rebooted where Windows XP re-detected the on-board audio.

I then uninstalled the Creative accompanying software, powered down, re-inserted the Audigy PCI card, powered on the PC, installed the drivers, and rebooted once more where the card again had working sound.

The issue? After turning in for the night, and turning my PC on again in the morning, the sound card isn't working again. This time it isn't even detected in the BIOS, let alone the Device Manager.

Is it possible it's messed up because... an insufficient power requirement? ... poor handling during shipping? ... manufacturers defect?

Is there any way to tell which?

[cluberti]

It's worth verifying if the reboot is doing something to the driver - for example, uninstall/reinstall and test, and then leave the system on for a few hours (or overnight, better) without going to sleep or hibernating. Check again after the elapsed time, and see if it still works. If so, then a reboot is likely to stop it from working again (which you can easily test). If so, it would sound more like a driver issue than a hardware one.